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THOREAU: ^ 



THE POET-NATURALISX 



OTit!) Jlentorial Vtt&t 



BY 



WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING., 




" My greatest skill has been to want but little. ■ For joy I could embrace 
the earth. I shall delight to be buried in it. And then I think of those 
among men, who will know that I love them, though I tell them not." — 
H. D. T. 



BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



By Transfer 

MAR 30 1917 



Cambridge: 
press of john wilson and son. 



DEDICA TION, 



Silent and serene^ 
The plastic soul emancipates her kind. 
She leaves the generations to their fate, 
Uncompromised by grief. She cannot weep : 
She sheds no tears for us, — our mother, Nature / 
She is ne^er rude nor vexed, not rough or careless j 
Out of temper ne'er, patient as sweet, though winds 
In winter bj^ush her leaves away, and time 
To human senses breathes through frost. 

My friend ! 
Learn, from the joy of Nature, thus to be : 
Not only all resigned to thy worst fears. 
But, like herself, superior to them all / 
Nor nierely superfcial in thy smiles ; 
And through the in7nost fibres of thy heart 
May goodness flow, and fix in that 
The ever-lapsi}ig tides, that lesser depths 
Deprive of half their salience. Be, throughout. 
True as the inmost life that moves the world, 
And in demeanor show a firm content. 
Annihilating change. 



VI DEDICA TION. 

TJnis Henry lived. 
Considerate to his kind. His love bestowed 
Was not a gift in fractions, halfway donej 
But with some mellow goodness, like a stin. 
He shone o''er mortal hearts, and tattght their buds 
To blossom early, thence ripe fruit and seed. 
Forbearifig too oft cotinsel, yet with blows 
By pieasi7ig reason uiged he touched their thought 
As with a mild surprise, and they were good. 
Even if they kjiew not whoice that motive came ; 
N'or yet suspected that from Henry'' s heart — 
His warm, confding heart — the impulse flowed. 



" Si tibi pulchra domus, si splendida mensa, quid inde ? 
Si species auri, argenti quoque massa, quid inde 1 
Si tibi sponsa decens, si sit generosa, quid inde 1 
Si tibi sunt nati, si praedia magna, quid inde ? 
Si fueris puleher, fortis, dives ve, quid inde ? 
Si doceas alios in quolibet arte, quid inde 1 
Si longus servorum inserviat ordo, quid inde ? 
Si faveat mundus, si prospera cuncta, quid inde ? 
Si prior, aut abbas, si dux, si papa, quid inde 1 
Si felix annos regnes per raille, quid inde 1 
Si rota fortunae se tollit ad astra, quid inde ? 
Tarn cito, tamque cito fugiunt haec ut nihil, inde ? 
Sola manet virtus : nos glorificabimur, inde. 
Ergo Deo pare, bene nam provenit tibi inde." 

Laura Bassi's 
Sonnet on the gate of the Specola at Bologna. 

"From sea and mountain, city and wilderness, ^ 

Earth lifts its solemn voice ; but thou art fled, 
Thou canst no longer know or love the shapes 
Of this phantasmal scene, who have to thee 
Been purest ministers, who are, alas ! 
Now thou art not. Art and eloquence, 
And all the shows of the world, are frail and vain 
To weep a loss that turns their light to shade ! 
It is a woe too deep for tears when all 
Is reft at once, when some surpassing spirit 
Whose light adorned the world around it leaves 
Those who remain behind nor sobs nor groans, 
But pale despair and cold tranquillity. 
Nature's vast frame, the web of human things, 
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were." 

Shellky. 

*' The memory, like a cloudless sky, 
The conscience, like a sea at rest.' 

Tennyson. 

" Esp(?rer ou craindre pour un autre est la seulo chose qui donne 
k riiomme le sentiment complet de sa propre existence." 

Eugenie de Gubkin. 



" For not a hidden path that to the shades 
Of the beloved Parnassian forest leads 
Lurked undiscovered by him ; not a rill 
There issues from the fount of Hippocrene, 
But he had traced it upward to its source, 
Through open glade, dark glen, and secret dell, 
Knew the gay wild-flowers on its banks, and culled 
Its med'cinable herbs ; yea, oft alone, 
Piercing the long-neglected holy cave, 
The haunt obscure of old Philosophy." 

Coleridge. 

" Such cooling fruit 
As the kind, habitable woods provide." 

Milton. 

*• My life is but the life of winds and tides. 
No more than winds and tides can I avail." 

Keats. 

" Is this the mighty ocean 1 — is this all ? " 

Landor. 

" Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch 
At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb ; 
Keep clean, bear fruit, earn life, and watch, 
Till the white- winged reapers come." 

Vaughan. 

" No one hates the sea and danger more than I do ; but I fear 
more not to do my duty to the utmost." — Sir Robert Wilson. 

" The joyous birds shrouded in cheerful shade, 
Their notes unto the voice attempted sweet ; 
Th' angelical soft trembling voices made 
To th' instruments divine respondence meet. 
With the low murmurs of the water's fall ; 
The water's fall with difference discreet. 
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call; 

The gentle warbling wind low answered to all." 

Sfenseb. 




CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 

I. Early Life 

IT. Manners and Reading . . 

TTT N^ATTTRR 












PAGB 

1 
20 
47 

58 

68 

78 

97 

120 

149 

169 

187 

210 

241 

2G3 


IV. Animals and Seasons . . 

V. Literary Themes .... 

VI. Spring and Autumn . . . 

VII. PUILOSOPHY 

VIII. Walks and Talks . . . 
IX. Walks and Talks continued 
X. The Latter Yeah . . . 

XL MULTL'M IX PaRVO . . . 

XIL IIis Writings 

XIII. Personalities 

XIV. Field Sports 













xii CONTENTS. 

XV. Chakactees 289 

XVI. Moral 310 



Memorial Verses 327 

I. To Henry 829 

II. White Pond 330 

III. A Lament 334 

IV. MoRRiCE Lake 336 

V. Tears in Spring 339 

VI. The Mill Brook ; . 341 

VII. Stillriver 344 

VIII. Truro 350 






CHAPTER L\ v-»^\ 

EARLY LIFE. "^"^^^^^ 

" Wit is the Soul's powder." — Datexaut. 

*" I ^HE subject of this sketch was born in the 
town of Concord, Mass., on the twelfth 
day of July, 1817. The old-fashioned house on 
the Virginia road, its roof nearly reaching to 
the ground in the rear, remains as it was when 
Henry David Thoreau first saw the light in the 
easternmost of its upper chambers. It was the 
residence of his grandmother, and a perfect piece 
of our New England style of building, w^ith its 
gray, unpainted boards, its grassy, unfenced door- 
yard. The house is somewhat isolate and remote 
from thoroughfares ; the Virginia road, an old- 
fasJiioned, winding, at-length-deserted pathway, 
the more smiling for its forked orchards, tum- 
bling walls, and mossy banks. About the house 
are pleasant, sunny meadows, deep with their 
beds of peat, so cheering with its homely, hearth- 
like fragrance ; and in front runs a constant stream 

1 A 



2 THOREAU. 

throngli the centre of that great tract sometiraes 
called "Bedford levels," — this brook, a source 
of the Shawsheen River. It was lovely he should 
draw his first breath in a pure country air, out 
of crowded towns, amid the pleasant russet fields. 
His parents were active, vivacious people ; his 
grandfather by the father's side coming from the 
Isle of Jersey, a Frenchman and Churchman at 
home, who married in Boston a Scotch woman 
called Jeanie Burns. On his mother's side the 
descent is from the well-known Jones family of 
Weston, Mass., and from Rev. Asa Dunbar, a 
graduate of Harvard College, who preached in 
Salem, and at length settled in Keene, N.H. As 
variable an ancestry as can well be afforded, with 
marked family characters on both sides. 

About a year and a half from Henry's birth, the 
family removed to the town of Chelmsford, thence 
to Boston, coming back however to Concord, when 
he was of a very tender age. His earliest memory 
almost of the town was a ride by Walden Pond with 
his grandmother, when he thought that he should 
be glad to live there. Henry retained a pecuhar 
pronunciation of the letter r, with a decided French 
accent. He says, " September is the first month 
with a hurr in it ; " and his speech always had an 
emphasis, a hurr in it. His great-grandmother's 
name was Marie le Calais ; and his grandfather, 



EABLY LIFE. 6 

Jolin Thoreau, was baptized April 28, 1754, and 
took the Anglican sacrament in the parish of St. 
Helier (Isle of Jersey), in May, 1773. Thus near 
to old France and the Church was our Yankee 
boy. 

He drove his cow to pasture, barefoot, like other 
village boys, and was known among the lads of his 
age as one who did not fear mud or water, nor 
paused to lift his followers over the ditch. So in 
his later journeys, if his companion was footsore 
and loitered, he steadily pursued the road, making 
his strength self-serviceable. 

" Who sturdily could gang, 
Who cared neither for wind nor wet, 
In lands where'er he past." 

That wildness that in him nothing could subdue 
stiU lay beneath his culture. Once when a fol- 
lower was done up with headache and incapable of 
motion, hoping his associate would comfort him 
and perhaps afford him a sip of tea, he said, 
" There are people who are siok m that way every 
morning, and go about their affairs," and then 
marched off about his. In such'iimits, so inevita- 
ble, was he compacted. 

Thoreau was not of those whij linger on the 
past : he had little to say and less to think of the 
houses or thoughts in which he had lived. They 
were, indeed, many mansions. He was entered 



4 TEOREAU. 

of Harvard College in tlie year 1833, and was a 
righteous and respectable student, having done a 
bold reading in English poetry, mastering Chal- 
mers's collection, even to some portions or the 
whole of Davenant's Gondibert. He made no 
college acquaintance which served him practically 
in after hfe, and partially escaped " his class," 
admiring the memory of the class secretary. No 
doubt, the important event to him in early man- 
hood was his journey to the White Mountains 
with his only brother John, who was the elder, 
and to whom he was greatly attached. With this 
brother he kept the Academy in Concord for a 
year or two directl}^ after leaving college. This 
piece of travel by boat and afoot was one of the 
excursion^ which furnish dates to his life. The 
next important business outwardly was building 
for himself a small house close by the shore of 
Walden Pond in Concord, the result of economic 
forethought. It was a durable garment, an over- 
coat, he had contrived and left by Walden, con- 
venient for shelter, sleep, or meditation. It had 
no lock to the door, no curtain to the window, and 
belonged to nature nearly as much as to man. 
His business taught him expedients to husband 
time : in our victimizmg climate he was fitted for 
storms or bad walking ; his coat must contain 
special convenience for a walker, with a note-book 



EARLY LIFE. 5 

and spy glass, — a soldier in his outfits. For shoddy- 
he had an aversion: a pattern of solid Vermont 
gray gave him genuine satisfaction, and he could 
think of corduro}^ His life was of one fabric. 
Pie S23ared the outfitters no trouble ; he wished the 
material cut to suit Am, as he was to wear it, not 
worshipping " the fashion " in cloth or opinion. 
He bought but few things, and " those not till 
long after he began to want them, so that when 
he did get them he was prepared to make a perfect 
use of them and extract their whole sweet. For 
if he was a mystic or transcendentalist, he was 
also a natural philosopher to boot." He did 
not live to health or exercise or dissipation, but 
work; his diet spare, his vigor supreme, his toil 
incessant. Not one man in a million loses so few 
of the hours of life ; and he found soon what 
were " the best things in his composition, and then 
shaped the rest to fit them. The former were the 
midrib and veins of the leaf." Few were better 
fitted. He had an unusual degree of mechanic 
skill, and the hand that wrote "Walden" and 
" The Week" could build a boat or a house. 

Sometimes he picked a scanty drift-wood from 
his native stream, and made good book-cases, 
chests, and cabinets for his study. I have seen 
the friendly " wreck " drying by his little air- 
tight stove for those homely jjurposes. He bound 



t) THOREAU. 

his own books, and measured the farmers' fields in' 
his village by chain or compass. In more than 
one the bounds were detected by the surveyor, 
who was fond of metes and bounds in morals 
and deeds. Thus he came to see the inside of 
almost every farmer's house and head, his "pot 
of beans " and mug of hard cider. Never in too 
much hurry for a dish of gossip, he could " sit out 
the oldest frequenter of the bar-room," as he 
beheved, and was alive from top to toe with curios- 
ity, — a process, it is true, not latent in our people. 
But if he learned, so he taught; and says he 
" could take one or twenty into partnership, gladly 
share his gains." On his return from a journey, 
he not only emptied his pack of flowers, shells, 
seeds, and other treasures, but liberally contributed 
every fine or pleasant or desirable experience to 
those who needed, as the milkweed distributes its 
lustrous, silken seeds. 

He was a natural Stoic, not taught from Epic- 
tetus nor the trail of Indians. Not only made he 
no complaint, but in him was no background of com- 
plaint, as in some, where a hf along tragedy dances 
in polished fetters. He enjoyed what sadness he 
could find. He would be as melancholy as he 
could and rejoice with fate. " Who knows but he 
is dead already ? " He voyaged about his river in 
December, the drops freezing on the oar, with a 



EARLY LIFE. 7 

cheering song ; pleased with the silvery chime of 
icicles against the stems of the button-bnshes, toys 
of "immortal water, alive even to the superficies." 
The blaze of July and the zero of January came 
to him as wholesome experiences, — the gifts of 
Nature, as he deemed them. He desired to im- 
prove every opportunity, to find a good in each 
moment, not choosing alone the blissful. He said 
that he could not always eat his pound cake ; 
while corn meal lasted he had resource against 
hunger, nor did he expect or wish for luxui'ies, 
and would have been glad of that Indian delicacy, 
acorn oil. " It was from out the shadow of his 
toil he looked into the light." 

Thoreau says that he knew he loved some 
things, and could fall hack on them ; and that he 
" never chanced to meet with any man so cheering 
and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely sugges- 
tive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well- 
meadow field." His interest in swamps and bogs 
was famihar : it grew out of his love for the wild. 
He thought that he enjoyed himself in Go wing's 
Swam23, where the hairy hucldeberry grows, equal 
to a domain secured to him and reaching to the 
South Sea ; and, for a moment, experienced there 
the same sensation as if he were alone in a bog in 
Kupert's Land, thus, also, saved the trouble of 
going there. The small cranberries (not the com- 



8 THOEEAU. 

mon species) looked to him "just like some kind 
of swamp-sparrow's eggs in tlieir nest ; like jewels 
worn or set in those sphagneous breasts of the 
swamp, — swamp pearls we might call them." It 
was the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive 
vigor of nature in us, that inspired that dream ; 
for Rupert's Land is recognized as surely by one 
sense as another. " Where was that strain mixed 
into which the world was di^opped but as a lump of 
sugar to sweeten the draught ? I would be drunk, 
drunk, drunk, — dead-drunk to this world with it 
for ever ! " 

"Kings unborn shall walk with me ; 
And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
What it will do when it is man." 

This tone of mind grew out of no insensibility ; 
or, if he sometimes looked coldly on the suffering 
of more tender natures, he sympathized with their 
afflictions, but could do nothing to admire them. 
He would not injure a plant unnecessarily. And 
once meeting two scoundrels who had been rude 
to a young girl near Walden Pond, he took instant 
means for their arrest, and taught them not to 
repeat that offence. One who is greatly affected 
by the commission of an ignoble act cannot want 
sentiment. At the time of the John Brown 
tragedy, Thoreau was driven sick. So the coun- 
trj-'s misfortunes in the Union war acted on his 



EARLY TAFE. 9 

feelings with great force : he used to say he 
" could never recover while the war lasted." 

The high moral impulse never deserted him, and 
he resolved early '' to read no book, take no Avalk, 
undertake no enterprise, but such as he could 
endure to give an accomit of to himself; and 
live thus deliberately for the most part." In our 
estimate of his character, the moral qualities form 
the basis : for himself, rigidly enjoined ; if in another, 
he could overlook delinquency. Truth before 
all things ; in your daily life, integrity before all 
things ; in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, 
the austerest purity, the utmost fulfilling of the 
interior law ; faith in friends, and an iron and 
flinty pursuit of right, which nothing can tease 
or purchase out of us. If he made an engage- 
ment, he was certain to fulfil his part of the con- 
tract ; and if the other contractor fjiiled, then his 
rigor of opinion prevailed, and he never more dealt 
with that particular bankrupt. 

" Merchants, arise 
And mingle conscience witli your merchandise." 

Thus, too, when an editor left out this sentence 
from one of his pieces, about the pine-tree, — "It 
is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as 
high a heaven, there to tower above me still," — 
Thoreau, having given no authority, considered 
the bounds of right were passed, and no more 
1* 



10 THOME AU. 

indulged in that editor. His opinion of publishers 
was not flattering. For several of his best papers 
he received nothing in cash, his pay coming in 
promises. When it was found that his writing 
was like to be popular, merchants were ready to 
run and pay for it. Soap-grease is not diamond ; 
to use a saying of his, " Thank God, they cannot 
cut down the clouds." To the work of every 
man justice will be measured, after the individual 
is forgotten. So long as our plain country is 
admired, the books of our author should give 
pleasure, pictures as they are of the great natural 
features, illustrated faithfully with details of smaller 
beauties, and having the pleasant, nutty flavor 
of New England. 

The chief attraction of " The Week " and " Wal- 
den" to pure and aspiring natures consists in their 
lofty and practical morality. To live rightly, 
never to swerve, and to believe that we have in 
ourselves a drop of the Original Goodness besides 
the well-known deluge of original sin, — these 
strains sing through Thoreau's writings. Yet he 
seemed to some as the winter he once describes, 
— " hard and bound-out like a bone thrown to a 
famishing dog." The intensity of his mind, like 
Dante's, conveyed the breathing of aloofness, — his 
eyes bent on the ground, his long, swinging gait, 
his hands perhaps clasped behind him or held 



EARLY LIFE. 11 

closely at his side, the fingers made into a fist. 
Yet, like the lock-tender at Middlesex, "he was 
meditating some vast and sunny problem," or giving 
its date to a humble flower. He did, in one man- 
ner, live in himself, as the poet says, — 

" Be thy own palace, or the world 's thy jail ; " 

or as Antoninus, " Do but few things at a time, 
it has been said, if thou would'st preserve thy 
peace." 

A pleasing trait of his warm feeling is remem- 
bered, when he asked his mother, before leaving 
college, what profession to choose, and she replied 
pleasantly, " You can buckle on your knapsack, 
and roam abroad to seek your fortune." The 
tears came in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, 
when his sister Helen, who was standing by, ten- 
derly put her arm around him and kissed him, say- 
ing, " No, Henry, you shall not go : you shall stay 
at home and live with us." He also had the firm- 
ness of the Indian, and could repress his pathos ; 
as when he carried (about the age of ten) his pet 
chickens to an innkeeper for sale in a basket, who 
thereupon told him " to stop,'^ and for convenience' 
sake topk them out one by one and wrung their 
several prett}^ necks before the poor boy's eyes, who 
did not budge. He had such seriousness at the 
same age that he was called "judge." His habit 



12 TEOBEAU. 

of attending strictly to his own affairs appears 
from this, that being complained of for taking a 
knife belonging to another boy, Henry said, " I 
did not take it," — and was believed. In a few 
days the culprit was found, and Henry then said, 
"I knew all the time who it was, and the day it 
was taken I went to Newton with father." " Well, 
then," of course, was the question, " why did you 
not say so at the time ? " "I did not take it," was 
his reply. This little anecdote is a key to many 
traits in his character. A school-fellow complained 
of him because he would not make him a bow and 
arrow, his skill at whittling being superior. It 
seems he refused, but it came out after that he had 
no knife. So, through life, he steadily declined 
trying or pretending to do what he had no means to 
execute, yet forbore explanations ; and some have 
thought his refusals were unwillingness. When 
he had grown to an age suitable for company, and 
not very fond of visiting, he could not give the 
common refusal, — that it was not convenient, or 
not in his power, or he regretted, — but said the 
truth, — " I do not want to go." An early anec- 
dote remains of his being told at three years that 
he must die, as well as the men in the catechism. 
He said he did not want to die, but was reconciled ; 
yet, coming in from coasting, he said he " did not 
want to die and go to heaven, because he could 



EARLY LIFE, 13 

not carry his sled with him ; for the boys said, as it 
was not shod with iron, it was not worth a cent." 
This answer prophesied the future man, who never 
could, nor did, believe in a heaven to which he 
could not carr}^ his views and principles, some 
of which were not shod with the vanity of this 
world, and pronounced worthless. In his later 
life, on being conversed with about leaving here as 
a finality, he replied that " he thought he should 
not go away from here." 

With his peculiarities, he did not fail to be set 
down by some as an original, — one of those who 
devise needlessly new ways to think or act. His 
retreat from the domestic camp to picket duty at 
Walden gave rise to sinister criticism, and the 
common question he was asked while there, " What 
do you live here for ? " as the man wished to know 
who lost his hound, but was so astouished at find- 
ing Henry in the woods, as quite to forget the 
stray dog. He had lost his hound, but he had 
found a man. As we learn from the verse, — 

" He that believes himself doth never lie," 

so Thoreau lived a true life in having his own 
belief in it. We may profitably distinguish between 
that sham egotism which sets itself above all other 
values, and that loyal faith in our instincts on 
wliich all sincere living rests. His life was a 



14 T HO BEAU. 

healthy utterance, a free and vital progress, joyous 
and serene, and thus proving its value. If he 
passed by forms that others hold, it was because 
his time and means were invested elsewhere. To 
do one thing well, to persevere, and accomplish one 
thing perfectly, Avas his faith ; and he said that 
fame was sweet, " as the evidence that the effort 
was a success." 

Henry, from his childhood, had quite a peculiar 
interest in the place of his birth, — Concord. He 
lived nowhere else for any length of time, and 
Staten Island, or the White Hills, or New Bedford, 
seemed little to him contrasted with that. I think 
he loved Cape Cod. The phrase local associations^ 
or the delightful word home^ do not explain his 
absorbing love for a town with few picturesque 
attractions beside its river. Concord is mostly 
plain land, with a sandy soil ; or, on the river, 
wide meadows, covered with wild grass, and apt to 
be flooded twice a year and changed to shallow 
ponds. The absence of striking scenery, unpleas- 
ing to the tourist, is an advantage to the naturalist : 
too much farming and gentlemen's estates are in 
his way. Concord contains an unusual extent of 
wood and meadow ; and the wood-lots, when cut 
off, are usually continued for the same purpose. 
So it is a village surrounded by tracts of woodland 
and meadow, abounding in convenient yet retired 
paths for walking. 



EARLY LIFE. 15 

No better place for his business. He enjoyed 
its use because he found there his materials for 
work. Perhaps the river was his great blessing 
in the landscape. No better stream for boating in 
New England, — " the sluggish artery of the Con- 
cord," as he names it. By this, he could go to 
other points ; as a trip up the river rarely ended 
with the water, but the shore was sought for some 
special purpose, to examine an animal or a plant, 
or get a wider view, or collect some novelty or 
crop. The study of the river-plants never ended, 
and like themselves floated for ever with the sweet 
waves ; the birds and insects peculiarly attracted 
to the shores ; the fish and musquash, sun and 
wind, were interesting. The first spring days 
smile softest on the river, and the fleet of withered 
leaves sailing down the stream in autumn give a 
stately finish to the commerce of the seasons. 

The hills, Anursnac, Nashawtuc, Fairhaven, are 
not lofty. Yet they have sufficient outlook, and 
carry the eye to Monadnock and the Peterboro' 
Hills, while nearer blue Wachusett stands alone. 

Thoreau visited more than once the principal 
mountains in his prospect. It was like looking 
off on a series of old homes. He went in the 
choice August or September days, and picked 
berries on Monadnock's stony plateau, took his 
roomy walk over the Mason Hills, or explored the 



16 THOEEAU. 

great Wacliusett pasture, — the fairest sight eye 
ever saw. For daily talk, Fairhaven answered very 
well. From this may be seen that inexhaustible 
expanse, Conantum, with its homely slopes ; thence 
Bine Hill, Nobscot, the great elm of Weston, and 
Prospect Hill. From the hills, always the stream, 
the bridges, the meadows : the latter, when flowed, 
the finest place for ducks and gulls ; whilst in their 
dry dress they furnish opportunities, from Copan 
down to Carlisle Bridge, or from Lee's to the 
causey in Wayland, for exploration in the mines of 
natural history. As the life of a hunter furnishes 
an endless story of wood and field, though pursued 
alone, so Nature has this inevitable abundance to 
the naturalist ; to the docile eye, a meadow-spring 
can furnish a tide of discourse. 

Three spacious tracts, uncultivated, where the 
patches of scrub-oak, wild apples, barberries, and 
other plants grew, which Mr. Thoreau admired, 
were Walden woods, the Estabrook country, and 
the old Marlboro' road. A poem on the latter 
crops out of his strictures on " Walking." They 
represent the fact as botanists, naturalists, or walk- 
ers would have it, — in a russet suit for field sports, 
not too much ploughed and furrowed out, with an 
eye looking to the sky. (Thoreau said that his 
heaven was south or south-west, in the neighbor- 
hood of the old Marlboro' road.) They have their 



EARLY LIFE. . IT 

ponds, choice fields or plants, in many cases care- 
fully hid away. He was compelled to name places 
for himself, hke all fresh explorers. His Utricularia 
Bay, Mount Misery, Cohosh Swamp, Blue Heron 
Rock, Pleasant Meadow, Scrub-oak Plain, denote 
localities near Fairhaven. He held to the old titles ; 
thus, — the Holt (in old English, a small, wooded 
tongue of land in a river). Beck Stow's Hole, Seven- 
star Lane, and the " Price Road." He knew the 
woods as a poet and engineer, and studied their suc- 
cessions, the growth and age of each patch, from 
year to year, with the chiefs of the forest, the white- 
pine, the pitch-pine, and the oak. Single localities 
of plants occur : in Mason's pasture is, or was, a 
baj^berry; on Fairhaven, a patch of yew. Some 
warm side hills afPord a natural greenhouse. Thus 
Lee's Chff, on Fakhaven Pond, shelters early cress 
and tower mustard, as well as pewees. If the 
poet's faculty be naming, he can find apphcations 
for it in the country. Thoreau had his Thrush 
Alley and Stachys Shore. 

A notice of him would be incomplete which did 
not refer to his fine social qualities. He served his 
friends sincerely and practically. In his own home 
he was one of those characters who may be called 
household treasures : always on the spot with skil- 
ful eye and hand to raise the best melons m the 
garden, plant the orchard with the choicest trees, 



18 THOREAU. 

act as extempore mechanic ; fond of the pets, the 
sister's flowers, or sacred Tabby, kittens being his 
favorites, — he would play with them by the half- 
hour. 

Some have fancied because he moved to Walden 
he left his family. He bivouacked there, and really 
hved at home, where he went every day. It is 
needless to dwell on the genial and hospitable enter- 
tainer he always was. His readers came many 
miles to see him, attracted by his writmgs. Those 
who could not come sent their letters. Those who 
came when they could no more see him, as strangers 
on a pilgrimage, seemed as if they had been his 
intimates, so warm and cordial was the sympathy 
they received from his letters. If he also did the 
duties that lay nearest and satisfied those in his 
immediate circle, certainly he did a good work ; and 
whatever the impressions from the theoretical part 
of his writings, when the matter is probed to the 
bottom, good sense and good feeling will be detected 
in it. A great comfort in him, he was eminently 
rehable. No whim of coldness, no absorption of 
his time by pubhc or private business, deprived 
those to whom he belonged of his kindness and 
affection. He was at the mercy of no caprice : of 
a rehable will and uncompromising sternness in his 
moral nature, he carried the same quahties into his 
relation with others, and gave them the best he had, 



EARLY LIFE. 19 

without stint. He loved firmly, acted up to his 
love, was a believer in it, took pleasure and satisfac- 
tion in abiding by it. As Thomas Froysell says of 
Sir Robert Harley, — " My language is not a match 
for his excellent virtues; liis spirituall lineaments 
and beauties are above my pencil. I want art to 
draw his picture. I know he had his humanities. 
. . . He was a friend to God's friends. They that 
did love God had his love. God's people were his 
darlings ; they had the cream of his affection. If 
any poor Christian were crushed by malice or 
wrong, whither would they fly but to Sir Robert 
Harley?" 



20 THOREAU. 



CHAPTER II. 

MANNERS AND READING. 
" Since they can only judge, who can confer." —Ben Jokson. 

"\T ?"£ hear complaint that he set up for a re- 
former ; and what capital, then, had he to 
embark in that line ? How was it he knew so 
much more than the rest, as to correct abuses, to 
make over church and state ? He had no reform 
theories, but used his opinions in literature for the 
benefit of man and the glory of God. Advice he 
did not give. His exhortations to young students 
and poor Christians who desired to know his econ- 
omy never meant to exclude the reasonable chari- 
ties. Critics have eagerly rushed and made the 
modest citizen and " home-body " one of the trav- 
elling conversational Shylocks, who seek their pound 
of flesh in swallowing humanity, each the special 
saviour on his own responsibility. As he says of 
reformers, " They addressed each other continually 
by their Christian names, and rubbed jom contin- 
ually with the greas}^ cheek of their kindness. 
They would not keep their distance, but cuddle up 
and he spoon-fashion with you, no matter how hot 
the weather or how narrow the bed. ... It was 



MANNERS AND READING. 21 

difficult to keep clear of the slimy benignity with 
which he sought to cover you, before he took 
you fairly into his bowels. He addressed me as 
Henry, within one minute from the time I first laid 
eyes on him ; and when I spoke, he said, with 
drawhng, sultry sympathy: 'Henry, I know ah 
you would say, I understand you perfectly: you 
need not explain any thing to me.' " Neither did 
he belong to the " Mutual Admiration " society, 
where the dunce passes for gold by rubbmg his 
fractional currency on pure metal. His was not 
an admiring character. 

The opinion of some of his readers and lovers 
has been that in his " Week " the best is the dis- 
course of Friendship. It is certainly a good speci- 
men of his peculiar style, but it should never be 
forgot that the treatment is poetical and romantic. 
No, writer more demands that his reader, his critic, 
should look at liis writing as a work of art. Because 
Michel Angelo painted the Last Judgment, we do 
not accuse him of being a judge : he is working as 
artist. So our author, in his writing on Friendship, 
treats the topic in a too distant fashion. Some 
might call it a lampoon : others say, " Why, this 
watery, moonht glance and ghmpse contains no 
more of tlie flesli and blood of friendship than so 
much lay-figure ; if this was all the writer knew of 
Friendship, he had better have sheared off and let 



22 THOREAU. 

this craft go free." As wlien lie says, " One goes 
forth prepared to say ' Sweet friends ! ' and the sal- 
utation is, ' Damn your eyes ! ' " — to read this liter- 
ally would be to accuse him of stupidity. The 
meaning is plain : he was romancing with his sub- 
ject, plajdng a strain on his "theorbo" like the 
bobolink. The living, actual friendship and affection 
which makes time a reality, no one knew better. 
He gossips of a high, imaginary world, giving a 
glance to the inhabitants of this world of that; 
bringing a few mother-of-pearl tints from the skies 
to refresh us in our native place. He did not wish 
for a set of cheap friends to eat up his time ; was 
rich enough to go without a train of poor relations, 
— the menagerie of dunces with open mouths. In 
the best and practical sense, no one had more 
friends or was better loved. He drew near him 
simple, unlettered Christians, who had questions 
they wished to discuss ; for, though nothing was less 
to his mind than chopped logic, he was ready to 
accommodate those who differed from him with his 
opinion, and never too much convinced by opposi- 
tion. And to those in need of information — to 
the farmer-botanist naming the new flower, the 
boy with his puzzle of birds or roads, or the young 
woman seeking for books — he was always ready 
to give what he had. 

Literally, his views of friendship were high and 



MANNERS AND READING. 23 

noble. Those who loved him never had the least 
reason to regret it. He made no useless profes- 
sions, never asked one of those questions which 
destroy all relation ; but he was on the spot at the 
time, and had so much of human Hfe in his keep- 
ing, to the last, that he could spare a breathing 
place for a friend. When one said that a change 
had come over the dream of life, and that solitude 
began to peer out curiously from the dells and wood- 
roads, he whispered, with his foot on the step of 
the other world, ''It is better some things should 
end." Having this unfaltering faith, and looking 
thus on life and death, after which, the poet says, 
a man has nothing to fear, let it be said for ever 
that there was no affectation or hesitancy in his 
dealing with his friends. He meant friendship, and 
meant nothing else, and stood by it without the 
slightest abatement ; not veering as a weathercock 
with each shift of a friend's fortune, or like those 
who bury their early friendships in order to gain 
room for fresh corpses. If he was of a Spartan 
mould, in a manner austere, if his fortune was not 
vast, and his learning somewhat special, he yet had 
what is better, — the old Roman belief which con- 
fided there was more in this hfe than applause and 
the best seat at the dinner-table : to have a moment 
to spare to thought and imagination, and to the res 
rusticce and those who need you ; 



24 THOREAU. 

" That hath no side at all 
But of himself." 

A pleasant accoTint of his easy assimilation is 
given of his visit to Canton, where in his Soph- 
omore year he kept a school of seventy pnpils, and 
where he was consigned to the care of Rev. O. A. 
Brownson, then a Unitarian clergjrman, for exam- 
ination. The two sat up talking till midnight, and 
Mr. Brownson informed the " School Committee " 
that Mr. Thoreau was examined, and would do, 
and board with him. So they struck heartily to 
studjdng German, and getting all they could of the 
time toQf-ether like old friends. Another school 
experience was the town school in Concord, which 
he took after leaving college, announcing that he 
should not flog, but would talk morals as a punish- 
ment instead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when 
a knowing deacon, one of the School Committee, 
walked in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog 
and use the ferule, or the school would spoil. So 
he did, by feruhng six of his pupils after school, 
one of whom was the maid-servant in his own 
house. But it did not suit well with his con- 
science, and he reported to the committee that 
he should no longer keep thek school, as they 
interfered with his arrangements ; and they could 
keep it. 

A moment may be spent on a few traits of 



MANNERS AND READING. 25 

Thoreau, of a personal kind. In height, he was 
about the average ; in his build, spare, with limbs 
that were rather longer than usual, or of which he 
made a longer use. His face, once seen, could not 
be forgotten. The features were quite marked: 
the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the 
portraits of Csesar (more like a beak, as was said) ; 
large, overhanging brows above the deepest set 
blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and 
in others gray, — eyes expressive of all shades of 
feeling, but never weak or near-sighted ; the fore- 
head not unusually broad or high, full of con- 
.centrated energy and purpose; the mouth with 
prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought 
when silent, and giving out when open a stream 
of the most varied and unusual and instructive 
sayings. His hair was a dark brown, exceedingly 
abundant, fine and soft ; and for several years he 
wore a comely beard. His whole figure had an 
active earnestness, as if he had no moment to 
waste. The clenched hand betokened purpose. 
In walking, he made a short cut if he could, and 
when sitting in the shade or by the wall-side 
seemed merely the clearer to look forward into the 
next piece of activity. Even in the boat he had a 
wary, transitory air, his eyes on the outlook, — per- 
haps there might be ducks, or the Blondin turtle, 
or an otter, or sparrow. 
2 



26 THOREAU, 

Thoreau was a plain man in Ms features and 
dress, one who could not be mistaken. This kind 
of plainness is not out of keeping with beauty. 
He sometimes went as far as homeliness, which 
again, even if there be a prejudice against it, shines 
out at times beyond a vulgar sense. Thus, he 
alludes to those who pass the night on the steamer's 
deck, and see the mountains in moonlight; and he 
did this himself once on the Hudson at the prow, 
when, after a "hem" or two, the passenger who 
stood next inquired in good faith : " Come, now, 
can't ye lend me a chaw o' baccy?" He looked 
like a shipmate. It was on another Albany steam- 
boat that he walked the deck hungrily among the 
fine gentlemen and ladies, eating, upon a half-loaf 
of bread, his dinner for the day, and very late. A 
plain man could do this heartily : an ornamental, 
scented thing looks affected. That was before the 
pedestrian disease. And once, as he came late into 
a town devoid of a tavern, on going to the best- 
looking house in the place for a bed, he got one in 
the entry, within range of the family, his speech 
and manners being those of polite society ; but in 
some of our retired towns there are traditions of 
lodgers who arise before light and depart with the 
feather bed, or the origin of feathers in the hen- 
coop. Once walking in old Dunstable, he much 
desired the town history by C. J. Fox ; and, knock- 



MANNERS AND READING. 27 

ing as usual at the best house, went in and asked 
a young lady who made her appearance whether 
she had the book in question : she had, — it 
was produced. After consulting it somewhat, 
Thoreau in his sincere way inquired very modestly 
whether she " would not sell it to him." I think 
the plan surprised her, and have heard that she 
smiled ; but he produced his wallet, gave her the 
pistareen, and went his way rejoicing with the 
book. 

He did his stint of walking on Cape Cod, 
where a stranger attracts a partial share of criti- 
cism, and " looked despairingly at the sandy village 
whose street he must run the gauntlet of; there 
only by sufferance, and feeling as strange as if he 
were in a town in China." One of the old Cod 
could not beheve that Thoreau was not a ped- 
ler ; but said, after explanations failed, " Well, 
it makes no odds what it is you carry, so long as 
you carry truth along with you." One of those 
idiots who may be found in some of the houses, 
grim and silent, one night mumbled he would get 
his gun " and shoot that damned pedler." And, 
indeed, he might have followed in the wake of a 
spectacle pedler who started from the inn of Meg 
Dods in Wellfleet, the same morning, both of them 
looking after and selling spectacles. He once 
appeared in a mist, in a remote part of the Cape, 



28 THOREAU. 

with a bird tied to the top of his umbrella, which 
he shouldered hke a gun : the inhabitants of the 
cottage, one of whom was a man with a sore leg, 
set the traveller down for a " crazy fellow." At 
Orleans he was comforted by two Italian organ- 
boys who had ground their harmonies from Prov- 
incetown, for two score miles in the sand, fresh 
and gay. 

He once stopped at a hedge-tavern where a 
large white bull-dog was kept in the entry: on 
asking the bar-tender what Cerberus would do to an 
early riser, he replied, "Do? — why, he would 
tear out the substance of your pantaloons." This 
was a good notice not to quit the premises with- 
out meeting the rent. Whatever was suitable he 
did: as lecturing in the basement of an Ortho- 
dox church in Amherst, when, he hoped facetiously 
he " contributed something to upheave and demol- 
ish the structure." He lectured in a Boston read- 
ing-room, the subscribers snuffing their chloroform 
of journals, not awoke by the lecture. A simple 
person can thus find easy paths. 

In the course of his travels, he sometimes met 
with a character that inspired him to describe it. 
He drew a Flemish sketch of a citizen of New 
York. 

" Getting into Patchogue late one night, there 
was a drunken Dutchman on board, whose wit 



MANNERS AND BEADING. 29 

reminded me of Shakespeare. When we came to 
leave the beach onr boat was aground, and we 
were detained waiting for the tide. In the mean 
while, two of the fishermen took an extra dram at 
the Beach House. Then they stretched them- 
selves on the seaweed by the shore in the sun, to 
sleep off the effects of their debauch. One was 
an inconceivably broad-faced young Dutchman, 
but oh ! of such a peculiar breadth and heavy look 
I should not know whether to call it more ridicu- 
lous or sublime. You would say that he had 
humbled himself so much that he was beginning to 
be exalted. An indescribable Mynheerish stupidity. 
I was less disgusted by their filthiness and vulgar- 
ity, because I was compelled to look on them as 
animals, as swine in their stye. For the whole 
voyage they lay flat on their backs in the bottom 
of the boat in the bilge-water, and wet with each 
bailing, half-insensible and wallowing in their filth. 
But ever and anon, when aroused by the rude 
kicks of the skipper, the Dutchman, who never 
lost his wits nor equanimity, though snoring and 
rolling in the reek produced by his debauch, blurted 
forth some happy repartee like an illuminated 
swine. It was the earthliest, slimiest wit I ever 
heard. The countenance was one of a million. 
It was unmistakable Dutch. In the midst of a 
million faces of other races it could not be mis- 



30 TEOBEAU. 

taken. It told of Amsterdam. I kept racking 
mj brains to conceive how he had been born in 
America, how lonely he must feel, what he did for 
fellowship. When we were groping up the narrow 
creek of Patchogue at ten o'clock at night, keep- 
ing our boat now from this bank, now from that, 
with a pole, the two inebriates roused themselves 
betimes. For in spite of their low estate they 
seemed to have all their wits as much about them 
as ever, ay, and all the self-respect they ever had. 
And the Dutchman gave wise directions to the 
steerer, which were not heeded (told where eels 
were plenty in the dark, &c.). At last he sud- 
denly stepped on to another boat which was 
moored to the shore, with a divine ease and sure- 
ness, saying, ' Well, good-night, take care of your- 
selves, I can't be with you any longer.' He was 
one of the few remarkable men I have met. I 
have been inspired by one or two men in their 
cups. There was really a divinity stirred within 
them, so that in their case I have reverenced the 
drunken, as savages the insane man. So stupid 
that he could never be intoxicated ; when I said, 
' You have had a hard time of it to-day,' he 
answered with indescribable good-humor out of 
the very midst of his debauch, with watery eyes, 
' It doesn't happen every day.' It was happening 
then." 



MANNERS AND READING, 31 

With these plam ways, no person was usually 
easier misapplied by the cultivated class than 
Thoreau. Some of those afflicted about him have 
started with the falsetto of humming a void esti- 
mate on his life, his manners, sentiments, and all 
that in him was. His two books, '' Walden " and 
the " Weekj" are so excellent and generally read, 
that a commendation of their easy, graceful, yet 
vigorous style and matter is superfluous. Singu- 
lar traits run through his writing. His sentences 
will bear study ; meanings not detected at the 
first glance, subtle hints which the writer himself 
Tn.2ij not have foreseen, appear. It is a good Eng- 
lish style, growing out of choice reading and famil- 
iarity with the classic writers, with the originality 
adding a piquant humor and unstudied felicities of 
diction. He was not in the least degree an imita- 
tor of any writer, old or new, and with little of 
his times or their opinions in his books. Never 
eager, with a pensive hesitancy he steps about his 
native fields, singing the praises of music and 
spring and morning, forgetful of himself. No 
matter where he might have lived, or in what 
circumstance, he would have been a writer: he 
was made for this by all his tendencies of mind 
and temperament ; a writer because a thinker and 
even a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. No bribe 
could have drawn him from his native fields, where 



32 TEOREAU, 

his ambition was — a very honorable one — to fairly 
represent himself in his works, accomplishing as 
perfectly as lay in his power what he conceived his 
business. More society would have impaired his 
designs ; and a story from a fisher or hunter was 
better to him than an evening of triviality in shining 
parlors where he was misunderstood. , His eye and 
ear and . hand fitted in with the special task he 
undertook, — certainly as manifest a destiny as any 
man's ever was. 

The best test of the worth of character, — 
whether the person lived a contented, joyous life, 
filled his hours agreeably, was useful in his way, 
and on the whole achieved his purposes, — this he 
possessed. The excellence of his books and style 
is identical with the excellence of his private life. 
He wished to write living books that spoke of 
out-of-door things, as if written by an out-of-door 
man ; and thinks his " Week " had that hypcethral 
character he hoped for. In this he was an artist. 
The impression of the "Week" and "Walden" 
is single, as of a living product ; a perfectly jointed 
building, yet no more composite productions could 
be cited. The same applies to the lectures on 
"Wild Apples" or "Autumnal Tints," which 
possess this unity of treatment ; yet the materials 
were drawn from the utmost variety of resources, 
observations made years apart, so skilfully woven 



MANNERS AND BEADING. 33 

as to appear a seamless garment of thought. This 
constructive, combining talent belongs with the 
adaptedness to the pursuit. Other gifts were sub- 
sidiary to his literary gift. He observed nature ; 
but who would have known or heard of that 
except through his literary effort? He observed 
nature, yet not for the sake of nature, but of man ; 
and says, '' If it is possible to conceive of an event 
outside to humanity, it is not of the slightest 
importance, though it were the explosion of the 
planet." 

Success is his rule. He had practised a variety 
of arts with many tools. Both he and his father 
were ingenious persons (the latter a pencil-maker) 
and fond of experimenting. To show the excel- 
lence of their work, they resolved to make as good 
a pencil out of paste as those sawed from black 
lead in London. The result was accomplished and 
the certificate obtained, Thoreau himself claim- 
ing a good share of the success, as he found the 
means to cut the plates. After his father's death 
he carried on the pencil and plumbago business ; 
had his own mill, and used the same punctuality 
and prudence in these affairs as ever distinguished 
him. 

In one or two of his later articles, expressions 
crept in which might lead the reader to suspect 
him of moroseness, or that his old trade of school- 
2* c 



34 THOBEAU. 

master stuck to him. He rubbed out as perfectly 
as he could the more humorous part of those 
articles, originally a relief to their sterner features, 
and said, " I cannot bear the levity I find." To 
which it was replied, that it was hoped he would 
spare them, even to the puns ; for he sometimes 
indulged. As when a farmer drove up with a 
strange pair of long-tailed ponies, his companion 
asked whether such a person would not carry a 
Colt's revolver to protect him in the solitude, 
Thoreau replied that " he did not know about that, 
but he saw he had a pair of revolving colts before 
him." A lady once asked whether he ever laughed, 
— and she was well acquainted with him halfway, 
but did not see him, unless as a visitor. He never 
became versed in making formal visits, and had 
not much success with first acquaintance. As to 
his laughing, no one did that more or better. One 
was surprised to see him dance, — he had been well 
taught, and was a vigorous dancer ; and any one 
who ever heard him sing " Tom Bowlin" will 
agree that, in tune and in tone, he answered, and 
went far beyond, all expectation. His favorite songs 
were Mrs. Hemans's " Pilgrim Fathers," Moore's 
" Evening Bells " and " Canadian Boat Song," 
and Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore," — pre- 
cisely the most tender and popular songs. And oh, 
how sweetly he played upon his flute ! Not unfre- 



MANNERS AND READING, 35 

quently he sang that brave catch of Izaak Wal- 
ton's, — 

** In the morning wlien we rise, 
Take a cup to wash our eyes," 

his cup of cold water. The Indians loved to 
drink at running brooks which were warm, but he 
loved ice-cold water. Summer or winter he drank 
very little, and would sometimes try to recollect 
when he drank last. 

Before he set out on a foot journey, he collected 
every information as to the routes and the place to 
which he was going, through the maps and guide- 
books. For this State he had the large State map 
divided in portions convenient, and carried in a 
cover such parts as he wanted: he deemed this 
ma]3, for his purposes, excellent. Once he made 
for himself a knapsack, with partitions for his books 
and papers, — india-rubber cloth, strong and large 
and spaced, the common knapsacks being unspaced. 
The partitions were made of stout book-paper. 
His route being known, he made a list of all he 
should carry, — the sewing materials never forgot- 
ten (as he Avas a vigorous walker, and did not stick 
at a hedge more than an English racer), the pounds 
of bread, the sugar, salt, and tea carefully decided 
on. After trying the merit of cocoa, coffee, water, 
and the like, tea was put down as tlie felicity of 
a walking '-'- travail^'^ — tea plenty, strong, with 



36 THOSE AU. 

enough sugar, made in a tin pint cup ; when it 
may be said the walker will be refreshed and grow 
intimate with tea-leaves. With him the botany 
must go too, and the book for pressing flowers (an 
old " Primo Flauto " of his father's), and the guide- 
book, spy-glass, and measuring-tape ; and every 
one who has carried a pack up a mountain knows 
how every fresh ounce tells. He would run up 
the steepest place as swiftly as if he were on dry 
land, and his breath never failed. He commended 
every party to carry " a junk of heavy cake " with 
plums in it, having found by long experience that 
after toil it was a capital refreshment. 

He made three journeys into the Maine wilder- 
ness, two from Moosehead Lake in canoes, accom- 
panied by Indians, another to Katahdin Mountain. 
These taught him the art of camping out ; and he 
could construct in a short time a convenient camp 
sufficient for permanent occupancy. His last ex- 
cursion of this kind was to Monadnock Mountain 
in August, 1859. He spent five nights in camp, 
having built two huts to get varied views. On a 
walk like this he always carried his umbrella ; and 
on this Monadnock trip, when about one mile from 
the station, a torrent of rain came down, the day 
being previously fine, when without his well-used 
aid his books, blankets, maps, and provisions 
would all have been spoiled, or the morning lost 



MANNERS AND READING. 37 

by delay. On the mountain, the first plateau being 
readied perhaps at about three, there being a thick, 
rather soaking fog, the first object was to camp and 
make tea. Flowers, birds, lichens, and the rocks 
were carefully examined, all parts of the mountain 
being visited ; and as accurate a map as could be 
made by pocket-compass carefully sketched and 
drawn out, in the five days spent there, with notes 
of the striking aerial phenomena, incidents of travel 
and natural history. 

Doubtless he directed his work with the view to 
writing on this and other mountains, and his collec- 
tions were of course in his mind. Yet all this was 
incidental to the excursion itself, the other things 
collateral. The capital in use, the opportunity of 
the wild, free life, the open air, the new and strange 
sounds by night and day, the odd and bewildering 
rocks among which a person can be lost within a 
rod of camp ; the strange cries of visitors to the 
summit ; the great valley over to Wachusett with 
its thunder-storms and battles in the cloud, to look 
at, not fear ; the farmers' back-yards in Jaffrey, 
where the family cotton can be seen bleaching on 
the grass, but no trace of the pygmy family ; the 
rip of night-hawks after twilight jjuttiiig up dor- 
bugs, and the dr}^ soft air all the night ; the lack 
of dew in the morning ; the want of water, a pint 
being a good deal, — these and similar things 



38 THOREAU. 

make up some part of such an excursion. It is 
all different from any thing, and would be so if 
you went a hundred times. The fatigue, the blaz- 
ing sun, the face getting broiled ; the pint cup 
never scoured ; shaving unutterable ; your stock- 
ings dreary, having taken to peat, — not all the 
books in the world, as Sancho says, could contain 
the adventures of a week in camping. 

A friendly coincidence happened on his last 
excursion, July, 1858, to the White Mountains. 
Two of his friends thought they might chance 
upon him there ; and, though he dreamed little of 
seeing them, he left a note at the Mountain House 
which said where he was going, and told them if 
they looked "they would see the smoke of his 
fire." This came to be true, the brush taking 
the flame, and a smoke rising to be seen over 
all the valley. Meantime, Thoreau, in leaping 
from one mossy rock to another (after nearly shd- 
ing down the snow-crust on the side of Tucker- 
man's Eavine, and saved by digging his nails into 
the snow), had fallen and severel}'' sprained his 
foot. Before this, he had found the Arnica mollis^ 
a plant famous for its healing properties ; but he 
preferred the ice-cold water of the mountain 
stream, into which he boldly plunged his tortured 
limb to reduce the swelling, had the tent spread, 
and then, the rain beginning to come down, so 



MANNERS AND READING. 39 

came his two friends down the mountain as well, 
tlieir outer integuments decimated with their tramp 
in the scrub. They had seen the smoke ; and here 
thej were in his little tent made for two, the rain 
falling all the while, and five full-grown men to be 
packed in for five days and nights, Thoreau unable 
to move on, but he sat and entertained them heart- 
ily. He admired the rose-colored linnseas lining 
the side of the narrow horse-track through the fir- 
scrub, and the leopard-spotted land below the 
mountains. He had seen the pines in Fitzwilliam 
in a primeval wood-lot, and " their singular beauty 
made such an impression that I was forced to turn 
aside and contemplate them. They were so round 
and perpendicular that m}^ eyes slid off." The 
rose-breasted grosbeaks sang in a wonderful strain 
on Mount Lafayette. He ascended such hills as 
Monadnock or Saddle-back Mountains by his own 
path, and ^\^ould lay down his map on the summit 
and draw a line to the point he proposed to visit 
below, perhaps forty miles away in the landscape, 
and set off bravely to make " the short-cut." The 
lowland people wondered to see him scaling the 
heights as if he had lost his way, or at his " jump- 
ing over their cow-yard fences," asking if he had 
fallen from the clouds. 

Allusion has been made to his faithful reading of 
English poetry at college. That he was familiar 



40 TEOREAU. 

with the classics and kept up the acquaintance, is 
shown by his translations from Persius, ^schylus, 
Homer, Cato, Aristotle, Pindar, Anacreon, Pliny, 
and other old writers. His " Prometheus Bound " 
was reprinted and used as a " pony " at Harvard 
College. Homer and Virgil were his favorites, 
like the world's. In English, Chaucer, Milton, 
Ossian, the Robin Hood Ballads ; the " Lycidas " 
never out of his mind, for he had the habit, more 
than usual among scholars, of thinking in the lan- 
guage of another, in an unstudied way. Of his 
favorites, he has written a pleasant account in his 
"Week." But he used these and all literature as 
aids, and did not stop in a book; rarely or never 
read them over. His reading was done with a pen 
in his hand: he made what he calls " Fact-books," 
— citations which concerned his studies. He had 
no favorite among modern writers save Carlyle. 
Stories, novels (excepting the History of Froissart 
and the grand old Pelion on Ossa of the Hindoo 
Mythology), he did not read. His East Indian 
studies never went deep, technically: into the 
philological discussion as to whether ab, ab, is 
Sanscrit, or " what is Om ? " he entered not. But 
no one relished the Bhagvat Geeta better, or the 
good sentences from the Vishnu Purana. He 
loved the Laws of Menu, the Vishna Sarma, 
Saadi, and similar books. After he had ceased to 



MANNERS AND READINO. 41 

read these works, be received a collection of them 
as a present, from England. Plato and Montaigne 
and Goethe were all too slow for him : the hobbies 
he rode dealt with realities, not shadows, and he 
philosophized ah initio. Metaphysics was his aver- 
sion. He believed and lived in his senses loftily. 
Speculations on the special faculties of the mind, or 
whether the Not Me comes out of the " I," or the 
All out of the infinite Nothing, he could not enter- 
tain. Like the Queen of Prussia, he had heard of 
les infiniments petits. In his way, he was a great 
reader and eagerly perused books of adventure, 
travel, or fact ; and never could frame a dearer 
wisli than spending the winter at the North pole : 
" could eat a fried rat with a relish," if oppor- 
tunity commanded. 

The '' Week " is a mine of quotations from good 
authors, the proof of careful reading and right 
selection. Such knotty writers as Qnarles and 
Donne here find a place in lines as fresh and sen- 
tentious as the fleetest wits. What so subtle as 
these lines from Quarles, — his " Divine Fancies " '^ 

" He that wants faith, and apprehends a grief, 
Because he wants it, hath a true belief; 
And he that grieves because his grief 's so small. 
Has a true grief, and the best Faith of all." 

" The laws of Nature break the rules of art," 



42 THOREAU. 

is from the same ; and the Emblems, Book IV., 

II., give the lines : — 

" I asked the schoolman, his advice was free, 
But scored me out too intricate a way." 

Also his favorites, — 

" Be wisely worldly, but not worldly wise." 

" The ill that 's wisely feared is half withstood." 

" An unrequested star did gently slide 
> . Before the wise men to a greater light." 

" Lord, if my cards be bad, yet grant me skill 
To play them wisely and make the best of ill." 

The famous Dean of St. Paul's, the learned Dr. 
Donne, was not less his favorite. He might have 
quoted, as an example of his own prevailing mag- 
nanimity, the stanza, — 

"For me (if there be such a thing as I), 

Fortune (if there be such a thing as she). 
Spies that I bear so well her tyranny, 
Tliat she thinks nothing else so fit for me." 

He had put this wise verse in his note-book as 
early as 1837, fi'om the same: — 

" Oh, how feeble is man's power, 

That if good Fortune fall. 
Cannot add another hour, 

Nor a lost hour recall ; 
But come bad chance, 

And we join to 't our strength, 

And we teach it art and length, 
Itself o'er us t' advance." 

" Only he who knows 
Himself knows more." 



MANNERS AND READING. 43 

The " Musophilus [of Samuel Daniel] ; contain- 
ing a general defence of learning, to the Right 
worthy and Judicious Favorer of Tirtue, Mr. 
Fulke Grevill," was a special gift to him from the 
age of Elizabeth. Daniel has other good backers ; 
but they have never found the best lines, as it was 
Thoreau's enviable privilege to do. This precious 
stanza is from the poem above-named : — 

'• Men find that action is another thing 

Than what they in discoursing papers read ; 
The world's affairs require in managing 
More arts than those wherein you clerks proceed." 

And this, too, a verse very often repeated by 
him, is from Daniel's " Epistle to the Lady Mar- 
garet, Countess of Cumberland : " — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man." 

So Daniel has his say on learning in the verse, — 

" How many thousand never heard the name 
Of Sidney or of Spenser, or their books 1 
And yet brave fellows, and presume of fame. 

And seem to bear down all the world with looks." 

Charles Cotton, the friend of Izaak Walton, 
gave him a motto for morning: — 

"And round about good morrows fly, 
As if day taught humanity." 

And one for evening, which Virgil, or Turner 



44 THOREAU. 

the English pamter, would have appreciated (^Et 
jam summa procul, etc.) : — 

" A very little, little flock 
Shades thrice the ground that it would stock, 
Whilst the small stripling following 'them 
Appears a mighty Polypheme." 

Cotton also afforded the fine definition of " Con- 
tentment : " — 

" Thou bravest soul's terrestrial paradise." 

And that great lament for the death of Thomas, 
Earl of Ossory : — 

" The English infantry are orphans now." 

He refers to Michael Drayton's Elegy, " To my 
dearly beloved friend, Henry Reynolds, of Poets 
and Poesy," where he says : — 

" Next Marlowe bathed in the Thespian springs 
"Had in him those brave translunary things 
That your first poets had : his raptures were 
All air and fire, which made his verses clear ; 
For that fine madness still he did retain 
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain." 

So Drummond's sonnet, " Icarus," pleased him 
with its stirring line : — 

"For still the shore my brave attempt resounds." 

Spenser's " Ruines of Rome " gave him those 
lines, — 



MANNERS AND READING. 45 

" Rome living was the world's sole ornament ; 
And dead, is now the world's sole monument. . . . 
With her own weight down pressed now she lies, 
And by her heaps her hugeness testifies." 

Ever alive to distinction, he admired that verse 
of Habington's, — 

" Let us set so just 
A rate on Knowledge, that the world may trust 
The poet's sentence, and not still aver 
Each art is to itself a flatterer." 

While the poem of the same author, with that 
nonpareil title, '' Nox nocti indicat seientiam,^^ drew 
the Esquimaux race, — 

"Some nation yet shut in 
With hills of ice." 

As for Giles and Phineas Fletcher, he exhumed 
from them certain of the best lines in his " Week," 
such as the passage from the former's " Christ's 
Victory and Triumph," beginning, — 

"How may a worm that crawls along the dust 
Clamber the azure mountains, thrown so high.** 

As well as this ; — 

" And now the taller sons whom Titan warms. 
Of unshorn mountains blown with easy winds, 
Dandle the morning's childhood in their arras ; ' 
And, if they chanced to slip the prouder pines, 
The under corylets did catch their shines. 
To gild their leaves." 

The two splendid stanzas from the " Purple 



46 THOREAU, 

Island " of Phineas Fletcher are unsurpassed in 
Elizabethan or later verse, beginning with, — 

" By them went Fido, marshal of the field." 

George Peele's mighty lines he knew, — 

" When Fame's great double-doors fall to and shut ; " 

and John Birkenhead's tribute to Beaumont, the 
dramatist, — 

" Thy ocean fancy knew nor banks nor dams, 
"We ebb down dry to pebble anagrams." 



NATURE, 47 



CHAPTER III. 



NATUEE. 

** For this present, hard 
Is the fortune of the bnrd 
Born out of time."— Emerson. 



T TIS habit was to go abroad a portion of each 
day to fields or woods, or the river : " I go 
out to see what I have caught in my traps, which I 
set for facts." He looked to fabricate an epitome 
of creation, and give us a homoeopathy of nature. 
All must get included. " No fruit grows in vain. 
The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch- 
pine." He wanted names. " I never felt easy till 
I got the name for the Andropogon scoparius (a 
grass) : I was not acquainted with my beautiful 
neighbor, but since I knew it was the Andropogon 
I have felt more at home in my native fields." He 
had no trace of that want of memory which 
infests amiable beinc^s. He loved the world and 
could not pass a berr}^, nor fail to ask his question, 
I fear — leading. Men who had seen the partridge 
drum, caught the largest pickerel, and eaten the 
most swamp apples, did him service ; and he long 
frequented one who, if not a sinner, was no saint, 



48 TEOREAU, 

whose destiny carried him for ever to field or 
stream, — not too bad for Nature. "Surely he is 
tenacious of life ; hard to scale." The Farmer who 
could find him a hawk's egg or give him a fisher's 
foot, he would wear in his heart of hearts, whether 
called Jacob or not. He admired our toil-crucified 
farmers, conditioned like granite and pine, slow 
and silent as the Seasons, — " like the sweetness of 
a nut, like the toughness of hickory. He, too, is 
a redeemer for me. How superior actually to the 
faith he professes ! He is not an ofiice-seeker. 
What an institution, what a revelation is a man ! 
We want foolishly to think the creed a man pro- 
fesses a more significant fact than the man he is. 
It matters not how hard the conditions seemed, 
how mean the world, for a man is a prevalent 
force and a new law himself. He is a system 
whose law is to be observed. The old farmer still 
condescends to countenance this nature and order 
of things. It is a great encouragement that an 
honest man makes this world his abode. He rides 
on the sled drawn by oxen, world-wise, yet com- 
paratively so young as if he had not seen scores 
of winters. The farmer spoke to me, I can swear, 
clear, cold, moderate as the snow where he treads. 
Yet what a faint impression that encounter may 
make on me after all. Moderate, natural, true, as 
if he were made of stone, wood, snow. I thus meet 



NATURE. 49 

in this universe kindred of mine composed of these 
elements. I see men like frogs : their peeping I 
partially understand." 

For cities, he felt like the camels and Arab 
camel-drivers who accompany caravans across the 
desert. The books and Dr. Harris, the college 
librarian, he saw in Cambridge, and in Boston the 
books and the end of Long Wliarf, where he went 
to snuff the sea. The rest, as he phrased it, " was 
barrels." In books, he found matters that tran- 
scend legislatures: "One wise sentence is worth 
the State of Massachusetts many times over." I 
never heard him complain that the plants were too 
many, the hours too long. As he said of the crow, 
" If he has voice, I have ears." The flowers are 
furnished, and he can bring his note-book. 

"As if by secret siglit, he knew 
Wliere, in far fields, the orchis grew." 

He obeyed the plain rule, — 

" Take tlie goods the gods provide tliee," 

and having neither ship nor magazine, gun or jave- 
lin, horse or hound, had conveyed to him a prop- 
erty in many things equal to the height of all his 
ambition. What he did not covet was not forced 
on his attention. AVhat he desired hxy at his feet. 
The breath of morning skies with the saffron of 
Aurora beautifully dight ; children of the air waft- 

3 D 



50 THOREAU. 

ing the smiles of spring from the vexed Bermoothes ; 
fragrant life-everlasting in the dry pastures ; blue 
forget-me-nots along the brook, — were his: ice 
. piled its shaggy enamel for him, where coral cran- 
berries yesterday glowed in the grass ; and forests 
whispered loving secrets in his ear. For is not the 
earth kind ? 

" We are rained and snowed on with gems. I 
confess that I was a little encouraged, for I was 
beginning to believe that Nature was poor and 
mean, and I now was convinced that she turned off 
as good work as ever. What a world we live in ! 
Where are the jeweller's shops ? There is nothing 
handsomer than a snow-flake and a dew-drop. I 
may say that the Maker of the world exhausts his 
skill with each snow-flake and dew-drop that He 
sends down. We think that the one mechanically 
coheres, and that the other simply flows together 
and falls ; but in truth they are the product of 
enthusiasm^ the children of an ecstasy, finished 
with the artist's utmost skill." 

He dreamed, for such a space as that fill-ed by 
the town of Concord, he might construct a cal- 
endar, — the out-of-door performances in order; 
and paint a sufficient panorama of the year, which 
multiplied the image of a day. It embraced cold 
and heat. He had gauges for the river, constantly 
consulted ; he noted the temperatures of springs 



NATURE. 51 

and ponds ; set down each novel sky ; the flower- 
ing of plants, their blossom and fruit ; the fall of 
leaves ; the arrivals and departures of the migrat- 
ing birds ; the habits of animals ; and made new 
seasons. No hour tolled on the great world-horo- 
loge must be omitted, no movement of the second- 
hand of this patent lever that is so full-jewelled. 

" Behold these flowers, let us be up with time, 
Not dreaming of three thousand years ago." 

No description can be given of the labor necessary 
for this undertaking, — labor and time and perse- 
verance. He drinks in the meadow, at Second 
Division Brook ; " then sits awhile to watch its 
yellowish pebbles, and the cress in it and the 
weeds. The ripples cover its surface as a network, 
and are faithfully reflected on the bottom. In 
some places, the sun reflected from ripples on a 
flat stone looks like a golden comb. The whole 
brook seems as busy as a loom : it is a woof and 
warp of ripples; fairy fingers are throwing the 
shuttle at every step, and the long, waving brook 
is the fine product. The water, is so wonderfully 
clear, — to have a hut here and a foot-path to the 
brook. For roads, I think that a poet cannot 
tolerate more than a foot-path through the field. 
That is wide enough, and for purposes of winged 
poesy suffices. I would fain travel by a foot-path 
round the world." 



52 THOREAU. 

So might he say in that mood, yet think the 
wider wood-path was not bad, as two could walk 
side by side in it in the ruts, — ay, and one more 
in the horse-track. He loved in the summer 
to lay up a stock of these experiences " for the 
winter, as the squirrel, of nuts, — something for 
conversation in winter evenings. I love to think 
then of the more distant walks I took in summer. 
Might I not walk further till I hear new crickets, 
till their creak has acquired some novelty as if 
they were a new species whose habitat I had dis- 
covered?" 

Night and her stars were not neglected friends. 
He saw 

" The wandering moon 
Riding near her highest noon," 

and sings in this strain : — 

" My dear, my dewy sister, let thy rain descend 
on me. I not only love thee, but I love the best 
of thee ; that is to love thee rarely. I do not love 
thee every day, commonly I love those who are less 
than thee ; I love thee only on great days. Thy 
dewy words feed me like the manna of the morning. 
I am as much thy sister as thy brother ; thou art 
as much my brother as my sister. It is a portion 
of thee and a portion of me which are of kin. 
Thou dost not have to woo me. I do not have to 
woo thee. O my sister ! O Diana ! thy tracks 



NATURE. 53 

are on the eastern hill. Thou merely passed that 
way. I, the hunter, saw them in the morning clew. 
My eyes are the hounds that pursued thee. Ah, 
my friend, what if I do not know thee ? I hear 
thee. Thou canst speak ; I cannot ; I fear and for- 
get to answer ; I am occupied with hearing. I 
awoke and thought of thee, thou wast present to 
my mind. How cam'st thou there ? Was I not 
present to thee likewise ? " 

Thou couldst look down with pity on that mound. 
Some silver beams faintly raining through the old 
locust boughs, for thy lover, thy Endymion, is 
watching there. He was abroad with thee after 
the midnight mass had tolled, and the consecrated 
dust of yesterdays each in its narrow cell for 
ever laid, which he lived to hive in precious vases 
for immortality, — tales of natural jjiety, bound 
each to each. 

" Now chiefly is my natal hour, 
And only now my prime of life. 
I will not doubt the love untold, 
Which not my worth nor want hath bought, 
Which wooed me young and wooes me old, 
And to this evening hath me brought." 

Thus conversant was he with great Nature. 
Perchance he reached the wildness for which he 
longed. 

" A nature which I cannot put my foot through, 



54 TEOBEATJ, 

woods where the wood-thrush for ever sings, where 
the hours are early raorning ones and the day is 
for ever improved, where I might have a fertile 
unknown for a soil about me." 

Always suggestive (possibly to some unattrac- 
tive) themes lay about him in this Nature. Even 
" along the wood-paths, wines of all kinds and 
qualities, of noblest vintages, are bottled up in the 
skins of countless berries, for the taste of men and 
animals. To men they seem offered, not so much 
for food as for sociality, that they may picnic with 
Nature, Diet drinks, cordial wines, we pluck and 
eat in remembrance of her. It is a sacrament, a 
communion. The not Forbidden Fruits, which no 
Serpent tempts us to taste." 

We will not forget the apothegm, — "A writer, 
a man writing, is the scribe of all nature ; he is 
the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing," 
— or that he says, "My business was writing." 
To this he neglected no culture from facts or men, 
or travel or books, neither did he gallop his ideas, 
and race for oblivion. "Whatever wi,t has been 
produced on the spur of the moment will bear to 
be reconsidered and reformed Avith phlegm. The 
arrow had best not be loosely shot. The most 
transient and passing remark must be reconsidered 
by the writer, made sure and warranted as if the 
earth had rested on its axle to back it, and all the 



NATURE. 65 

natural forces lay beliiud it. The writer must 
direct his sentences as carefully as the marksman 
his rifle, who shoots sitting and with a rest, with 
patent sights and conical balls besides. If you 
foresee that a part of your essay will topple down 
after the lapse of time, throw it down yourself." 
This was his sure and central fire, — the impulse to 
faithfully account for himself. " Facts collected 
by a poet are set down at last as winged seeds of 
truth, — samarce., tinged with his expectation. Oh, 
may my words be verdurous and sempiternal as 
the hills!" 

No labor too onerous, no material too costly, if 
outlaid on the right enterprise. Every thing has 
its price. His working up the Indians corroborates 
this. These books form a library by themselves. 
Extracts from reliable authorities from DeBry to 
poor Schoolcraft, with the early plates and maps 
accurately copied, and selections from travellers the 
world over ; for his notes embraced all that bears 
on his "list of subjects," — wherever scalps, wam- 
pum, and the Great Spirit prevail, — in all uncivil- 
ized i)eople. Indian customs in Natick are savage 
customs in Brazil, the Sandwich Islands, or Tim- 
buctoo. With the Indian vocabularies he was 
familiar, and in his Maine excursions tested his 
knowledge by all the words he could get from the 
savages in puris naturalibus. Personally these liv- 



5Q THOREAU. 

ing red men were not charming ; and he wonld 
creep out of camp at night to refresh his olfac- 
tories, damped with uncivilized perfumes, which it 
seems, like musquash and other animals, they 
enjoy. After the toughest day's work, when even 
his bones ached, the Indians would keep awake till 
midnight, talking eternally all the while. They 
performed valiant feats as trencher-men, " licked 
the platter clean," and for all answer to many of 
his questions grunted ; which did not discourage 
him, as he could grunt himself. Their knowledge 
of the woods, the absolutisms of their scent, sight, 
and appetite, amazed him. He says, " There is 
always a slight haze or mist in the brow of the 
Indian." He read and translated the Jesuit rela- 
tions of the first Canadian missions, containing 
" the commodities and discommodities " of the 
Indian life, such as the roasting of a fresh parson. 
He read that romantic book, " Faite par le Sieur 
de la Borde," upon the origin, manners, customs, 
wars, and voyages of the Caribs, who were the 
Indians of the Antilles of America ; how these 
patriots will sell their beds in the morning (their 
memories too short for night), and in their heaven, 
Ouicou, the Carib beer runs all the while. The 
children eat dirt and the mothers work. If the 
dead man own a negro, they bury him with his 
master to wait on him in paradise, and despatch 



NATURE. 5T 

the doctor to be sure of one in the other state. 
The men and women dress alike, and they have 
no police or civility ; everybody does what ho 
pleases. 

" Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind 
Brews beer in heaven, and drinks it for mankind." 



8* 



58 THOBEAU. 



CHAPTER IV. 

ANIMALS AKD SEASONS. 

*' Lus aguas van con los cielos." — Columbus. 

" It snewed in Ms house of mete and drinke." — Chauceb. 

A NOTHER faithful reading was those old 
■^ ^ Roman farmers, Cato and Varro, and musi- 
cally named Columella, for whom he had a liking. 
He is reminded of them by seeing the farmers so 
busy in the fall carting out their compost. " I see 
the farmer now on every side carting out his 
manure, and sedulously making his compost-heap, 
or scattering it over his grass-ground and breaking 
it up with a mallet, and it reminds me of Cato's 
advice. He died 150 years before Christ. Indeed, 
the farmer's was pretty much the same routine then 
as now. ' Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. 
Stercus sedulo conserva, cum exportatis purgato et 
comminuito. Per autumnum evehito.' Study to 
have a great dungheap. Carefully preserve your 
dung.. When you carry it out, make clean work of 
it, and break it up fine. Carry it out during the 
autumn." Just such directions as you find in the 
Farmers' Almanac to-day. As if the farmers of 
Concord were obeying Cato's directions, who but 



ANIMALS AND SEASONS. 59 

repeated the maxims of a remote antiquity. Noth- 
ing can be more homely and suggestive of the 
6 very-day life of the Roman agriculturists, thus 
supplying the usual deficiencies in what is techni- 
cally called Roman history ; i.e., revealing to us the 
actual hfe of the Romans, the " how they got their 
living," and " what they did from day to day." 
Rome and the Romans commonly are a piece of 
rhetoric, but we have here their "New England 
Farmer," or the very manual those Roman farmers 
read, as fresh as a dripping dishcloth from a Roman 
kitchen. 

His study of old writers on Natural History was 
careful: Aristotle, JElian, and Theophrastus he 
sincerely entertained, and found from the latter 
that neither the weather nor its signs had altered 
since his day. Pliny's magnum opus was his last 
reading in this direction, a work so valuable to 
him, with the authors just named, that he meant 
probably to translate and write on the subject as 
viewed by the ancients. As illustrations, he care- 
fully noted many facts from modern travellers, 
whose writing hatches Jack-the-Giant-Killers as 
large as Pliny's. He observed that Aristotle was 
furnished by the king with elephants and other 
creatures for dissection and study : his observations 
on the habits of fish and their nests especially 
interested Thoreau, an expert in spawn. In con- 



60 TEOBEAU. 

tinuing this line of study, lie was aided by the 
perusal of St. Pierre, Gerard, Linnaeus, and early 
writers. The "Studies of Nature" he admired, 
as written with enthusiasm and spirit, — qualities 
in his view essential to all good writing. The old 
English botanist pleased him by his affectionate 
interest in plants, with something quaint, like Eve- 
lyn, Tusser, and Walton. Recent scientific pdte-de- 
foie-gras — a surfeit of microscope and "dead words 
with a tail" — he valued for what it is worth, 
— the stuf&ng. For the Swede, his respect was 
transcendent. There is no better explanation of 
his love for botany than the old — "Consider the 
lilies of the field how they grow ; they toil not, 
neither do they spin : and yet I say unto you, that 
even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like 
one of these." His pleasant company, during so 
many days of every year, he wished he was better 
acquainted with. The names and classes change, 
the study of the lovely flower persists. He wished 
to know willow and grass and sedge, and there 
came always with the new year the old wish 
renewed : a carex, a salix, kept the familj^ secret. 

" For years my appetite was so strong that I fed, 
I browsed on the pine-forest's edge seen against 
the winter horizon, — the silvery needles of the 
pine straining the light; the young aspen-leaves 
like light green fires. The young, birch-leaves^ 



ANIMALS AND SEASONS. €(1 

very neatl}^ plaited, small, triangular, liglit green 
leaves, yield an agreeable, sweet fragrance, just 
expanded and sticky, sweet-scented as innocence. 
. . . The first liumble-bee, that prince of hum- 
mers, — he follows after flowers. To have your 
existence depend on flowers, like the bee and 
humming-birds. ... I expect that the lichenist 
will have the keenest relish for Nature in her 
every-day mood and dress. He will have the 
appetite of the worm that never dies, of the grub. 
This product of the bark is the essence of all times. 
The lichenist loves the tripe of the rock, that 
which eats and digests the rock : he eats the eater. 
A rail is the fattest and sleekest of coursers for 
him. . . . The blue curls and fragrant everlasting, 
with their ripening aroma, show themselves now 
pushing up on dry fields, bracing to the thought; 
I need not smell the calamint, — it is a balm to my 
mind to remember its fragrance. The pontederia 
is in its prime, alive with butterflies, — yellow and 
others. I see its tall blue spikes reflected beneath 
the edge of the pads on each side, pointing down 
to a heaven beneath as well as above. Earth 
appears but a thin crust or pellicle. 

"It is a leaf — that of the green-briar — for 
poets to sing about : it excites me to a sort of 
autumnal madness. They are leaves for satyrs 
and fawns to make their garlands of. My thoughts 



62 THOBEAU. 

break out like them, spotted all over, yellow and 
green and brown, — the freckled leaf. Perhaps 
they should be poison to be thus spotted. I have 
now found all the Hawk- weeds. Singular are 
these genera of plants, — plants manifestly related, 
yet distinct. They suggest a history to nature, a 
natural history in a new sense. . . . Any anomaly 
in vegetation makes Nature seem more real and 
present in her working, as the various red and 
yellow excrescences on young oaks. I am affected 
as if it were a different nature that produced them. 
As if a poet were born, who had designs in his 
head. ... I perceive in the Norway cinque-foil 
(^Potentilla Norvegicd)^ now nearly out of blossom, 
that the alternate six leaves of the calyx are clos- 
ing over the seeds to protect them. This evidence 
of forethought, this simple reflection in a double 
sense of the term, in this flower is affecting to me, 
as if it said to me, ' Not even when I have blos- 
somed and have lost my painted petals, and am 
preparing to die down to its root, do I forget to 
fall with my arms around my babe, faithful to the 
last, that the infant may be found preserved in the 
arms of the frozen mother.' There is one door 
closed of the closing year. I am not ashamed to 
be contemporary with the cinque-foil. May I per- 
form my part as well. We love to see Nature 
fruitful in whatever kind. I love to see the acorns 



ANIMALS AND SEASONS. 63 

plenty on the scrub-oaks, ay, and the night-shade 
berries. It assures us of her vigor, and that she 
may equally bring forth fruits which we prize. I 
love to see the potato-balls numerous and large, 
as I go through a low field, the plant thus bearing 
fruit at both ends, saying ever and anon, ' Not 
only these tubers I offer you for the present, but if 
you will have new varieties (if these do not satisfy 
you), plant these seeds, fruit of the strong soil, 
containing potash ; the vintage is come, the olive 
is ripe. Why not for my coat-of-arms, for device, 
a drooping cluster of potato-balls in a potato field ? 

" I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, 
And with forced fingers rude, 
Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year." 

These glimpses at the life of the lover of nature 
admonish us of the richness, the satisfactions in 
his unimpoverished districts. Man needs an open 
mind and a pure purpose, to become receptive. 
His interest in animals equalled that in flowers. 
At one time he carried his spade, digging in the 
galleries and burrows of field-mice. " They run 
into their holes, as if they had exploded before 
your eyes." Many voyages he made in cold autumn 
days and winter walks on the ice, to examine the 
cabins of the muskrat and discover precisely how 
and of what they were built, — the suite of rooms 
always damp, yet comfortable for the household, 



64 THOBEAU, 

dressed in their old-fashioned waterproofs. He 
respected the skunk as a human being in a very 
humble sphere. 

In his western tour of 1860, when he went to 
Minnesota and found the crab-apple and native 
Indians, he pleased himself with a new friend, — 
the gopher with thirteen stripes. Rabbits, wood- 
chucks, red, gray, and "chipmunk" squirrels, he 
knew by heart; the fox never came amiss. A 
Canada lynx was killed in Concord, whose skin he 
eagerly obtained and preserved. It furnished a 
proof of wildness intact, and the nine lives of a 
wildcat. He mused on the change of habit in 
domestic animals, and recites a porcine epic, — 
the adventures of a fanatic pig. He was a debtor 
to the cows like other walkers. 

" When you approach to obserA'-e them, they 
mind you just enough. How wholesome and clean 
their clear brick red ! No doubt man impresses 
his own character on the beasts which he tames 
and employs. They are not only humanized, but 
they acquire his particular human nature. . . . 
The farmer acts on the ox, and the ox reacts on the 
farmer. They do not meet half way, it is true ; but 
they do meet at a distance from the centre of each, 
proportionate to each one's intellectual power." 

Let us hasten to his lovely idyl of the " Beau- 
tiful Heifer:" — 



ANIMALS AND SEASONS. 65 

*' One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the 
herd, did by degrees approach as if to take some 
morsel from our hands, while our hearts leaped 
to our mouths with expectation and delight. She 
by degrees drew near with her fair limbs (progres- 
sive), making pretence of browsing; nearer and 
nearer, till there was wafted to us the bovine fra- 
grance, — cream of all the dairies that ever were 
or will be : and then she raised her gentle muzzle 
towards us, and snuffed an honest recognition 
within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for his 
herd to inspire with love the herdsman. She was 
as delicately featured as a hind. Her hide was 
mingled white and fawn color, and on her muzzle's 
tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy ; 
and on her side turned toward me, the map of Asia 
plain to see. 

"Farewell, dear heifer! Though thou forge t- 
test me, my prayer to heaven shall be that thou 
mayst not forget thyself. There was a whole 
bucolic in her snuff. I saw her name was Sumac. 
And by the kindred spots I knew her mother, 
more sedate and matronly with full-grown bag, 
and on her sides was Asia great and small, the 
plains of Tartary, even to the pole ; Avhile on her 
daughter's was Asia Minor. She was not disposed 
to wanton with the herdsman. And as I Avalked 
she followed me, and took an apple from my hand, 



QQ THOEEAU. 

* 
and seemed to care more for the hand than the 
apple. So innocent a face as I have rarely seen on 
any creature, and I have looked in the face of 
many heifers. And as she took the apple from 
my hand I caught the apple of her eye. She 
smelled as sweet as the clethra blossom. There 
was no sinister expression. And for horns, though 
she had them, the}' were so well disposed in the 
right place, but neither up nor down, I do not 
now remember she had any. No horn Avas held 
towards me." 

Seeing a flock of tui^keys, the old faintly gob- 
bling, the half-grown yomig peeping, they suggest 
a company of " turkey-men." He loves a cricket 
or a bee : — 

" As I went through the deep cut before sunrise, 
I heard one or two early humble-bees come out on 
the deep, sandy bank : their low hum sounds like 
distant horns far in the horizon, over the woods. 
It was long before I detected the bees that made 
it, so far away musical it sounded, like the shep- 
herds in some distant vale greeting the king of 
day. Why was there never a poem on the cricket ? 
so serene and cool, — the iced-cream of song. It 
is modulated shade ; heard in the grass chirping 
from everlasting to everlasting, the incessant cricket 
of the fall ; no transient love-strain hushed when 
the incubating season is past. They creak hard 



ANIMALS AND SEASONS. 67 

now after sunset, no word will spell it; and the 
humming of a dorbug drowns all the noise of the 
village. So roomy is the universe. The moon 
comes out of the mackerel-cloud, and the traveller 
rejoices." 

No class of creatures he found better than birds. 
With these mingled his love for sound: ''Listen 
to music religiously, as if it were the last strain 
you might hear. Sugar is not as sweet to the 
palate as sound to the healthy ear. Is not all 
music a hum more or less divine ? " His concert 
was the blue-bird, the robin, and song-sparrow, 
melting into joy after the silent winter. ^^ Do you 
know on what bushes a Uttle peace, faith, and con- 
tentment grow ? Go a-berrying early and late 
after them." The color of the bluebird seemed to 
him " as if he carried the sky on his back. And 
where are gone the bluebirds whose warble was 
wafted to me so lately like a blue wavelet through 
the air, warbling so innocently to inquire if any 
of its mates are within call? The very grain of 
the air seems to have undergone a change, and is 
ready to spht into the form of the bluebird's war- 
ble. The air over these fields is a foundry full of 
moulds for casting bluebirds' warbles. Methinks 
if it were visible or I could cast up some fine dust 
which would betray it, it would take a correspond- 
ing shape." 



68 TEOREA U. 

CHAPTER y. 

LETEKARY THEMES. 

No tidings come to thee 
Not of tlij' very neighbors, 
That dwellen ahuost at thy doors, 
Thou hearest neither that nor this; 
For when thy hibor all done is, 
And hast made all thy reckonings, 
Instead of rest and of new things, 
Thou goest home to thy house anon. 

Chaucer. 

To hill and cloud his face was known, — 
It seemed the likeness of their own. 

Emerson. 

His short parenthesis of life was sweet. 

Stoker's Life of Wolsey. 

" "\ /TEN commonl}^ exaggerate the theme. Some 
-^^^ themes they think are significant, and 
others insignificant. I feel that my life is very 
homely, my pleasures very cheap. Joy and soitoav, 
success and failure, grandeur and meanness, and 
indeed most words in the Enoiish lani2uaoe, do not 

O CD O ' 

mean for me what they do for my neighbors. I see 
that my neighbors look with compassion on me, 
that they think it is a mean and unfortunate des- 
tiny which makes me to walk in these fields and 
woods so much, and sail on this liver alone. But 
so long as I find here the only I'eal elysium, I can- 
not hesitate in my choice. My work is writing, 



LITERARY THEMES. 69 

and I do not hesitate though I know that no sub- 
ject is too trivial for me, tried by ordinary stand- 
ards ; for, ye fools, the theme is nothing, the life is 
every thing. All that interests the reader is the 
depth and intensity of the life exerted. We touch 
our subject but by a point which has no breadth ; 
but the pyramid of our experience, or our interest 
in it, rests on us by a broader or narrower base. 
What is man is all in all. Nature nothing but as she 
draws him out and reflects him. Give me simple, 
cheap, and homely themes." 

These words from Thoreau partially illustrate 
his views upon the subjects he proposed to treat 
and how they should be treated, with that poetic 
v^ealth he enjoyed, and no one need look for 
prose. He never thought or spoke or wrote that. 

In the same spirit he says of his first book, which 
had a slow sale : " I believe that this result is more 
inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had 
bought my wares. It affects my privacy less, and 
leaves me freer. Men generally over-estimate their 
praises." Of these themes, the following is one 
view among others : — 

" As I walked I was intoxicated with the slight, 
spicy odor of the hickory-buds and the bruised 
bark of the black-birch, and in the fall with the 
pennyroyal. The sight of budding woods intoxi- 
cates me like diet-drink. I feel my Maker blessing 



70 THOREAU. 

me. To the sane man the world is a musical 
instrument. Formerly methought Nature devel- 
oped as I developed, and grew up with me. My 
life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of 
my senses, I can remember that I was all alive and 
inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction ; 
both its weariness and its refreshment were sweet 
to me. This earth was the most glorious musical' 
instrument, and I was audience to its strains. To 
have such sweet impressions made on us, such 
ecstasies begotten of the breezes, I can remember 
I was astonished. I said to myself, I said to 
others, there comes into my mind such an indescrib- 
able, infinite, all-absorbing, divine, heavenly pleas- 
ure, a sense of salvation and expansion. And I 
have had naught to do with it ; I perceive that I 
am dealt with by superior powers. By all manner 
of bounds and traps threatenmg the extreme penalty 
of the divine law, it behooves us to preserve the 
purity and sanctity of the mind. That I am inno- 
cent to myself, that I love and reverence my life." 

To make these themes into activities, he con- 
sidered, — 

" The moods and thoughts of man are revolving 
just as steadily and incessantly as Nature's. Noth- 
ing must be postponed ; take time by the forelock, 
now or never. You must live in the present, 
launch yourself on any wave, find your eternity in 



LITERARY THEMES. 71 

each moment. Fools stand on their island oppor- 
tunities, and look toward another land. There is 
no other land, there is no other life but this or the 
like of this. Where the good husbandman is, 
there is the good soil. Take any other course, and 
life will be a succession of regrets." 

If writing is his business, to do this well must 
be sought. 

'' What a faculty must that be which can paint 
the most barren landscape and humblest life in 
glorious colors. It is pure and invigorated sense 
reacting on a sound and strong uuagination. Is 
not this the poet's case? The intellect of most 
men is barren. It is the marriage of the soul with 
Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives 
birth to imagination. When we were dead and 
dry as the highway, some sense which has been 
healthily fed will put us in relation with Nature, in 
sympathy with her, some grains of fertilizing pollen 
floating in the air fall on us, and suddenly the sky is 
all one rainbow, is full of music and fragrance and 
flavor. The man of intellect only, the prosaic 
man, is a barren and staminiferous flower ; the 
poet is a fertile and perfect flower. The poet 
must keep himself unstained and aloof. Let him 
perambulate the bounds of Imagination's provinces, 
the realms of poesy and not the insignificant boun- 
daries of towns. How many faculties there are 



72 TEOREAU. 

which we have never found. Some men methinks 
have found only their hands and feet. 

" It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many 
themes, that so you may find the right and inspir- 
ing one. Be greedy of occasions to express your 
thoughts ; improve the opportunity to draw anal- 
ogies ; there are innumerable avenues- to a percep- 
tion of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each 
object, however humble, however slight and tran- 
sient the provocation; what else is there to be 
improved? Who knows what opportunities he 
maj" neglect? It is not in vain that the mind 
turns aside this way or that: follow its leading, 
apjDly it whither it inclines to go. Probe the 
universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of 
these impulses. Nature makes a thousand acorns 
to get one oak. He is a wise man and exj^erienced 
who has taken many views, to whom stones and. 
plants and animals, and a myriad objects have 
each suggested something, contributed something. 
We cannot write well or truly but what we write 
with gusto. The body and senses must conspire 
with the mind. Experience is the act of the 
whole man, — that our speech may be vascular. 
The intellect is powerless to express thought with- 
out the aid of the heart and liver and of every 
member. Often I feel that my head stands out too 
dry when it should be immersed. A writer, a man 



LITERARY THEMES. 73 

writing, is the scribe of all nature ; he is the com 
and the grass and the atmosphere Aviiting. It is 
always essential that we live to do what we are 
doing, do it with a heart. There are flowers of 
thought and there are leaves of thought, and most 
of our thoughts are merely leaves to which the 
thread of thought is the stem. Whatever things I 
perceive with my entire man, those let me record 
and it wiU be poetry. The sounds which I hear 
with the consent and coincidence of all my senses, 
those are significant and musical ; at least, they 
only are heard. I omit the unusual, the hurricanes 
and earthquakes, and describe the common. This 
has the greatest charm, and is the true theme of 
poetry. You may have the extraordinary for your 
province if you will ; let me have the ordinary. 
Give me the obscure life, the cottage of the poor 
and humble, the work-days of the world, the bar- 
ren fields ; the smallest share of all things but 
poetical perception. Give me but the eyes to see 
the things which you possess." 

As he writes of the strawberry, "It is natural 
that the first fruit which the earth bears shall emit 
and be as it were an embodiment of that vernal 
fragrance with which the air has teemed," so he 
represented the purity and sweetness of youth, 
which in him nevei' grew old. 



74 TEOBEAU. 

" How watcliful we must be to keep the crystal 
well clear, that it be not made turbid by our con- 
tact with the world, so that it will not reflect 
objects. If I would preserve my relation to Nature, 
I must make my life more moral, more pure and 
innocent. The problem is as precise and simple as 
a mathematical one. I must not live loosely, but 
more and more continently. How can we expect 
a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-tune 
of character ? Already some of my small thoughts, 
fruit of my spring life, are i^ipe, Hke the berries 
which feed the first broods of birds ; and some others 
are prematurely ripe and bright hke the lower 
leaves of the herbs which have felt the summer's 
drought. Human life may be transitory and full 
of trouble, but the perennial mind whose survey 
extends from that spring to this, from Columella to- 
Hosmer, is superior to change. I will identify 
myself with that which will not die with Columella 
and will not die with Hosmer." 

As the song of the spring birds makes the rich- 
est music of the year, it seems a fit overture to 
have given a few of Thoreau's spring sayings upon 
his life and work. Few men knew better, or so 
well, what these were. In some senses he was 
a scientific man, in others not. I do not think he 
relished science in long words, or the thing Words- 
worth calls — 



LITERARY THEMES. 75 

"Philosopher ! a fingering slave, 
One that would peep and botanize 
Upon his mother's grave." 

He loved Nature as a child, reverenced her 
veils that we should not conceitedly endeavor to 
raise. He did not believe the study of anatomy 
helped the student to a practical knowledge of the 
human body, and replied to a suggested prescrip- 
tion, " How do you know that his pills will go 
down?" Nor that the eggs of turtles to be, seen 
through a glass darkly, were turtles, and said to 
the ornithologist who wished to hold his bird in his 
hand that "he would rather hold it in his affec- 
tions." So he saw the colors of his with a kind 
heart, and let the spiders slide. Yet no man spent 
more labor in making out his bird by Wilson or 
Nuttall. 

His was a broad catholic creed. As he thought 
of the Hindoo Mythology, " It rises on me like 
the full moon after the stars have come out, wading 
through some far summer stratum of sky." From 
Homer, who made a corner with Grecian mythol- 
ogy, to his beloved Indian, whose life of scalping 
and clam-bakes was a religion, he could appreciate 
the good of creeds and forms and omit the scruples. 
He says : — 

" If I could, I would worship the paring of my 
nails. He who discovers two gods where there 



76 THOREAU. 

was only known to be one, and such a one ! I 
would fain improve every opportunity to wonder 
and worship as a sunflower welcomes the light." 
" God could not be unkind to me if he should try. 
I love best to have each thing in its season, doing 
without it at all other times. It is the greatest of 
Y" all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all. I 
have never got over my surprise that I should have 
been born into the most estimable place in all the 
world, and in the very nick of time too. I heard 
one speak to-day of his sense of awe at the thought 
of God, and suggested to him that awe was the 
cause of the potato-rot." 

■ He again expressed himself in a lively way 
about these matters : " Who are the religious ? 
They who do not differ much from mankind gener- 
ally, except that they are more conservative and 
timid and useless, but who in their conversation 
and correspondence talk about kindness and Heav- 
enly Father, instead of going bravely about their 
business, trusting God even." He once knew a 
minister, and photographs him : " Here's a man 
who can't butter his own bread, and he has just 
combined with one thousand Hke him to make a 
dipt toast for all eternity." 

Of a book published by Miss Harriet Martineau, 
that Minerva mediocre, he observes : " Miss Martin- 
eau's last book is not so bad as the timidity which 



LITERARY THEMES. 77 

fears its influence. As if the popularity of this or 
that book could be so fatal, and man would not 
still be man in the world. Nothing is so much to 
be feared as fear. Atheism may, comjDaratively, be 
popular with God." Religion, worship, and prayer 
were words he studied in their history ; but out-of- 
doors^ which can serve for the title of much of his 
writing, is his creed. ^He used this expression: 
" May I love and revere myself above all the gods 
that man has ever invented ; may I never let the 
vestal fire go out in my recesses." 

He thought the past and the men of the past, as 
they crop out in institutions, were not as valuable as 
the present and the individual alive. " They who 
will remember only this kind of right do as if 
they stood under a shed and affirmed that they 
were under the unobserved heavens. The shed 
has its use, but what is it to the heavens above." 
The institution of American slavery was a filthy 
and rotten shed which Thoreau used his utmost 
strength to cut away and burn up. From first to 
last he loved and honored abolitionism. Not one 
slave alone was expedited to Canada by Thoreau's 
personal assistance. 



78 THOREAU. 



CHAPTER VI. 

SPEING AKD AUTUMK. 

" Methinks I hear the sound of time long past, 
Still murmuring o'er us in the lofty void 
Of these dark arches, like the ling'ring voice 
Of those who long within their graves have slept." 

Okra, a Tragedy. 

A S he is dropping beans in the spring, he hears 
the bajwing : — 
" I saw the world through a glass as it lies eter- 
nally. It reminded me of many a summer sunset, 
of many miles of gray rails, of many a rambling 
pasture, of the farmhouse far in the fields, its 
milk-pans and well-sweep, and the cows coming 
home at twihght ; I correct my Human views by 
hstening to their Yolucral. I ordinarily plod along 
a sort of whitewashed prison entry, subject to 
some indifferent or even grovelling mood ; I do not 
distinctly seize my destiny; I have turned down 
my light to the merest glimmer, and am doing 
some task which I have set myself. I take incred- 
ibly narrow views, live on the hmits, and have no 
recollection of absolute truth. But suddenly, in 
some fortunate moment, the voice of eternal wis- 
dom reaches me even in the strain of the sparrow, 
and hberates me ; whets and clarifies my own 
senses, makes me a competent witness." 



SPBINQ AND AUTUMN. 79 

He says elswhere of the same sparrow : " The 
end of its strain is like the ring of a small piece of 
steel wire dropped on an anvil." How he loved 
Aurora ! how he loved the morning ! " You must 
taste the first glass of the day's nectar if you 
would get all the spirit of it. Its fixed air begins 
to stir and escape. The sweetness of the day 
crystallizes in the morning coolness." The morn- 
ing was the spring of the day, and spring the 
morning of the year. Then he said, musing : " All 
Nature revives at this season. With her it is really 
a new life, but with these church-goers it is only 
a revival of religion or hypocrisy ; they go down 
stream to still muddier waters. It cheers me 
more to behold the mass of gnats which have 
revived in the spring sun. If a man do not revive 
with Nature in the spring, how shall he revive 
when a white-collared priest prays for him?" 
This dash at theological linen is immediately fol- 
lowed by " small water-bugs in Clematis Brook." 

Of the willow fish-creel in Farrar's Brook he 
says : — 

"It was equal to a successfid stanza whose 
subject was spring. I see those familiar features, 
that large tj^pe with which all my life is associated, 
unchanged. We too are obeying the laws of all 
nature. Not less important are the observers of 
the birds than the birds themselves. This rain is 



80 THOREAU. 

good for thought, it is especially agreeable to me 
as I enter the wood and hear the rustling dripping 
on the leaves. It domiciliates me in nature. The 
woods are more like a house for the rain ; the few 
slight noises resound more hollow in them, the 
birds hop nearer, the very trees seem still and pen- 
sive. We love to sit on and walk over sandy 
tracts in the spring, like cicindelas. These tongues 
of russet land, tapering and sloping into the flood, 
do almost speak to me. One piece of ice, in break- 
ing on the river, rings when struck on another, 
like a trowel on a brick. The loud peop of a 
pigeon woodpecker is heard in our rear, and anon 
the prolonged and shrill cackle calling the thin 
wooded hillsides and pastures to life. You doubt 
if the season will be long enough for such oriental 
and luxurious slowness. I think that my senses 
made the truest report the first time. There is a 
time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake, to look 
for arrow-heads, to study the rocks and lichens, 
a time to walk on sandy deserts, and the observer 
of nature must improve these seasons as much as 
the farmer his. 

" Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of 
mostly bare, brown, or tawny dry woodlands, them- 
selves the most hving objects. They may say to 
the first woodland flowers, — ' We played with 
the North winds here before ye were born ! ' When 



SPItINO AND AUTUMN. 81 

the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to 
right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead 
leaves. This pine warbler impresses me as if it 
were calling the trees to life ; I think of springing 
twigs. Its jingle rings through the wood at short 
intervals, as if, like an electric spark, it imparted a 
fresh s^^ring life to them. The fresh land emerg- 
ing from the water reminds me of the isle which 
was called up from the bottom of the sea, which 
was given to Apollo. Or, like the skin of a pard, 
the great mother leopard that Nature is, where 
she lies at length exposing her flanks to the sun. 
I feel as if I could land to kiss and stroke the 
very sward, it is so fair. It is homely and domes- 
tic to my eyes like the rug that lies before my 
hearth-side. As the walls of cities are fabled to 
have been built by music, so my pines were estab- 
lished by the song of the field-sparrow. I heard 
the jingle of the blackbird, — some of the most 
liquid notes, as if produced by some of the water 
of the Pierian spring flowing through some kind of 
musical water-pipe and at the same moment setting 
in motion a multitude of fine vibrating metallic 
springs, like a shepherd merely meditating most 
enrapturing tunes on such a water-pipe. The 
robin's song gurgles out of all conduits now, — 
they are choked with it. 

•' I hear at a distance in the meadow, still at 

4* E 



82 THOREAU. 

long intervals, the hurried commencement of the 
bobolink's strain : the bird is just touching the 
strings of his theorbo, his glavichord, his water- 
organ, and one or two notes globe themselves and 
fall in liquid bubbles from his teeming throat. . . . 
Beginning slowly and deliberately, the partridge's 
beat sounds faster and faster far away under the 
boughs and through the aisle of the wood, until it 
becomes a regular roll. How many things shall 
we not see and be and do, when we walk there 
where the partridge drums. The rush-sparrow jin- 
gles her small change, — pure silver on the counter 
of the pasture. How sweet it sounds in a clear, 
warm morning, in a wood-side pasture, amid the 
old corn-hills, or in sprout-lands, clear and distinct 
like ' a spoon in a cup,' the last part very clear and 
ringing. I hear the king-bird twittering or chat- 
tering like a stout-chested swallow, and the sound 
of snipes winnowing the evening air. The cuckoo 
reminds me of some silence among the birds I had 
not noticed. I hear the squirrel chirp in the wall, 
like a spoon. Times and seasons may perhaps be 
best marked by the notes of reptiles ; they express, 
as it were, the very feelings of the earth or nature. 
About May-day the ring of the first toad leaks into 
the general stream of sound, — a bubbling ring; 
I am thrilled to my very spine, it is so terrene a 
sound, as crowded with protuberant bubbles as the 



SPBING AND AUTUMN. ■ 83 

rind of an orange, sufi&ciently considered by its 
maker, in the night and the solitude. I hear the 
dumping sound of frogs, that know no winter. It 
is like the tap of a drum when human legions are 
mustering. It reminds me that Summer is now 
in earnest gathering her forces, and that ere long 
I shall see their waving plumes and hear the full 
bands and steady tread. What lungs ! what health ! 
what terrenity (if not serenity) it suggests ! How 
many walks I take along the brooks in the spring ! 
What shall I call them? Lesser riparial excur- 
sions ? prairial rivular ? If you make the least 
correct observation of nature this year, you will 
have occasion to repeat it with illustrations the 
next, and the season and life itself is prolonged. 
Days long enough and fair enough for the worthiest 
deeds. The day is an epitome of the year. I 
think that a perfect jjarallel may be drawn between 
the seasons of the day and of the year. If the writer 
would interest readers, he must report so much life, 
using a certain satisfaction always as a point d'ap- 
pui. However mean and limited, it must be a 
genuine and contented life that he speaks out of. 
They must have the essence and oil of himself, 
tried out of the fat of his experience and joy." ^ 

" The Titan heeds his sky affairs. 
Rich rents and wide aUiance shares ; 
Mysteries of color daily laid 
By the sun in light and shade ; 
And sweet varieties of chance." 



84 THOSE AU. 

Color was a treat to Thoreau. He saw the 
seasons and the landscapes through their colors ; 
and all hours and fields and woods spoke m varied 
hues which impressed him with sentiment. Nature 
does not forget beauty and outline even in a mud- 
turtle's shell. Is it winter? — he "loves the few 
homely colors of Nature at this season, her strong, 
wholesome browns, her sober and primeval grays, 
her celestial blue, her vivacious green, her pure, 
cold, snowy white. The mountains look like 
waves in a "blue ocean tossed up by a stiff gale." 
In early spring he thinks, — 

" The white saxifrage is a response from earth 
to the increased light of the year, the yellow crow- 
foot to the increased light of the sun. Why is the 
pollen of flowers commonly yellow ? The pyram- 
idal pine-tops are now seen rising out of a reddish, 
permanent mistiness of the deciduous trees just 
bursting into leaf. The sorrel begins to redden 
the fields with ruddy health. The sun goes down 
red again like a high-colored flower of summer. 
As the white and j^ellow flowers of the spring are 
giving place to the rose and will soon to the reel lil}'-, 
so the yellow sun of spring has become a red sun 
of June drought, round and red like a midsummer 
flower, productive of torrid heats. Again, I am 
attracted by the deep scarlet of the wild rose, half 
open in the grass, all glowing with rosy light." 



SPRING AND AUTUMN. 85 

" The soft, mellow, fawn-colored light of the 
July sunset seemed to come from the earth itself. 
My thoughts are drawn inward, even as clouds and 
trees are reflected in the smooth, still water. There 
is an inwardness even in the musquito's hum while 
I am picking blueberries in the dark wood. The 
landscape is fine as behind glass, the horizon edge 
distinct. The distant vales towards the north-west 
mountains lie up open and clear and elysian like so 
many Tempes. The shadows of trees are dark and 
distinct; the din of trivialness is silenced. The 
woodside after sunset is cool as a pot of green 
paint, and the moon reflects from the rippled sur- 
face like a stream of dollars. The shooting stars 
are but fireflies of the firmament. Late in Septem- 
ber, I see the whole of the red-maple, — bright 
scarlet against the cold, green pines. The clear, 
bright scarlet leaves of the smooth sumac in many 
places are curled and drooping, hanging straight 
down, so as to make a funereal impression, remind- 
ing me of a red sash and a soldier's funeral. They 
impress me quite as black crape similarly arranged, 
— the bloody plants. In mid December the day is 
short; it seems to be composed of two twilights 
merely, and there is sometimes a peculiar, clear, 
vitreous, greenish sky in the west, as it were a 
molten gem." 

" In this January thaw I hear the pleasant sound 



86 TEOREAU. 

of running water ; here is my Italy, my heaven, 
my New England. I can imclerstand why the 
Indians hereabouts placed heaven in the south-west, 
the soft south. The delicious, soft, spring-suggest- 
ing air ! The sky, seen here and there through 
the wrack, bluish and greenish, and perchance 
with a vein of red in the west, seems like the 
inside of a shell deserted by its tenant, into wliich 
I have crawled. What beauty in the running 
brooks I What life I What society ! The cold is 
merely superficial ; it is summer still at the core, 
far, far within. It is in the cawing of the crow, 
the crowing of the C(5ck, the warmth of the sun on 
our backs. I hear faintly the cawing of a crow far, 
far away, echoing from some unseen woodside, as 
if deadened by the spring-like vapor which the sun 
is drawing from the ground. It mingles with the 
slight murmur from the village, the sound of chil- 
dren at play, as one stream gently empties into 
another, and the wild and tame are one. AYhat a 
delicious sound ! It is not merely crow calling to 
crow. If he has voice, I have ears. ... I think 
I never saw a more elysian blue than ray shadow. 
I am turned into a tall, blue Persian from my cap 
to my b£iots, such as no mortal dye can produce, 
with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. 

" The holes in the pasture where rocks were 
taken out are now converted into perfect jewels. 



SPRING AND AUTUMN. 87 

They are filled with water of crystalline transpar- 
ency, through which I see to theu' emerald bottoms, 
paved with emerald. Even these furnish goblets 
and vases of perfect purity to hold the dews and 
rains ; and what more agreeable bottom can we 
look to than this, which the earliest sun and moist- 
ure had tinged green ? I see an early grasshopper 
drowning in one ; it looks like a fate to be envied : 
April wells call them, vases clean, as if enamelled. 
What wells can be more charming? You almost 
envy the wood-frogs and toads that hop amid such 
gems as fungi, some pure and bright enough for a 
breastpin. Out of every crevice between the dead 
leaves oozes some vehicle of color, the unspent 
wealth of the year which Nature is now casting 
forth, as if it were only to empty herself. And, 
now to your surprise, these ditches are crowded 
with millions of little stars (^Aster Tradeseanti). 
Call them travellers' thoughts. What green, herba- 
ceous, graminivorous thoughts the wood-frog must 
have ! I wish that my thoughts were as reasonable 
as his." 

" I notice many little, pale-brown, dome-shaped 
puff-balls, puckered to a centre beneath, which 
emit their dust: when you pinch them, a smoke- 
like, brown dust (snuff-colored) issues from the 
orifice at their top, like smoke from a chimne}^ It 
is so fine and light that it rises into the air and ig 



88 TEOEEAU, 

wafted away like smoke. Tliey are low, oriental 
domes or mosques, sometimes crowded together in 
nests like a collection of humble cottages on the 
moor, in the coal-pit or Numidian style. For there 
is suggested some humble hearth beneath, from 
which this smoke comes up, as it were, the homes 
of slugs and crickets. Amid the low and wither- 
ing grass, their resemblance to rude, dome-shaped 
cottages where some humble but everlasting life 
is lived, pleases me not a little, and their smoke 
ascends between the legs of the herds and the 
traveller. I imagine a hearth and pot, and some 
snug but humble family passing its Sunday evening 
beneath each one. I locate there at once all that 
is simple and admirable in human life ; there is no 
virtue which their roofs exclude. I imagine with 
what faith and contentment I could come home to 
them at evening." 

Thus social is Nature, if her lover bring a friendly 
heart. The Ipve of beauty and truth which can 
light and cheer its possessor, not only in youth and 
health, but to the verge of the abyss, walked 
abroad with our Walden naturahst ; for Nature 
never did betray the heart that loved her. To 
be faithful in few things, to possess your soul in 
peace and make the best use of the one talent, is 
deemed an acceptable offering, — omne devotum jpro 
signifieo. 



SPUING AND AUTUMN. «y 

" I am a stranger in your towns ; I can Avinter 
more to my mind amid the shrub-oaks ; I have 
made arrangements to stay with them. The shrub- 
oak, lowly, loving the earth and spreading over it, 
tough, thick-leaved ; leaves firm and sound in win- 
ter, and rustling like leather shields ; leaves firm 
and wholesome, clear and smooth to the touch. 
Tough to support the snow, not broken down by 
it, well-nigh useless to man, a sturdy phalanx hard 
to break through, product of New England's sur- 
face, bearing many striped acorns. Well-tanned 
leather-color on the one side, sun-tanned, color of 
colors, color of the cow and the deer, silver-downy 
beneath, turned toward the late bleached and rus- 
set fields. What are acanthus leaves and the rest 
to this, emblem of my winter condition ? I love 
and could embrace the shrub- oak with its scaly 
garment of leaves rising above the snow, lowly 
whispering to me, akin to winter thoughts and sun- 
sets and to all virtue. Rigid as iron, clear as the 
atmosphere, hardy as virtue, innocent and sweet as 
a maiden, is the shrub-oak. I felt a positive yearn- 
ing to one bush this afternoon. There was a match 
found for me at last, — I fell in love with a shrub- 
oak. Low, robust, hardy, indigenous, well-known 
to the striped squirrel and the partridge and rabbit, 
what is Peruvian bark to your bark ! How many 
rents I owe to you, how many eyes put out, how 



90 TEOREAU. 

many bleeding fingers. How many shrub-oak 
patches I have been through, winding my way, 
bending the twigs aside, guiding myself by the 
sun over hills and valleys and plains, resting in 
clear grassy spaces. I love to go through a patch 
of scrub-oaks in a bee hne, — where you tear your 
clothes and put your eyes out." 

" Sometimes I would rather get a transient 
glimpse, a side view of a thing, than stand front- 
ing to it, as these polypodys. The object I caught 
a glimpse of as I went by, haunts my thought a 
long time, is infinitely suggestive, and I do not 
care to front it and scrutinize it ; for I know that 
the thing that really concerns me is not there, but 
in my relation to that. That is a mere reflecting 
surface. Its influence is sporadic, wafted through 
the air to me. Do you imagine its fruit to stick to 
the back of its leaf all winter? At this season, 
potypody is in the au\ My thoughts are with them 
a long time after my body has passed. It is the 
cheerful community of the polypodys : are not wood- 
frogs the philosophers who walk in these groves ? " 

As in winter : " How completely a load of hay 
revives the memory of past summers. Summer in 
us is only a little dried like it." The foul flanks 
of the cattle remind him how early it still is in the 
spring. He knows the date by his garment, and 
says on the twenty-eighth of April, " The twenty- 



SPBING AND AUTUMN. 91 

seventh and to-day are weather for a half-thick 
single coat. This first off-coat warmth." The 
first week of May, " The shadow of the chff is like 
a dark pupil on the side of the hill. That cliff and 
its shade suggests dark eyes and eyelashes and 
overhanging brows. It is a leafy mist throughout 
the forest." And with a rare comparison, " The 
green of the new grass the last week in April has 
the regularity of a parapet or rampart to a fortress. 
It winds along the irregular lines of tussucks like 
the wall of China over hill and dale. As I am 
measuring along the Marlboro' road, a fine little 
blue-slate butterfiy fluttered over the chain. Even 
its feeble strength was required to fetch the year 
about. How daring, even rash. Nature ap23ears, 
who sends out butterflies so early. Sardanapalus- 
like, she loves extremes and contrasts." (It was 
this day, April 28, 1856, that Thoreau first defi- 
nitely theorized the succession of forest trees.) 
The sight and sound of the first humming-bird 
made him think he was in the tropics, in Demerara 
or Maracaibo. Or shall we take an autumn walk, 
the first September week? 

" Nature improves this, her last opportunity, to 
empty her lap of flowers. 

" I turn Anthony's corner. It is an early Sep- 
tember afternoon, melting, warm, and sunny ; the 
thousand of grasshoppers leaping before you reflect 



92 THOREAU. 

gleams of light. A little distance off, the field is 
yellowed with a Xerxean army of Solidago nemo- 
ralis (gray golden-rod) between me and the snn. 
It spreads its legions over the dry plains now, as 
soldiers muster in the fall, fruit of August and 
September sprung from the sun-dust. The fields 
and hills appear in their yellow uniform (its re- 
curved standard, a little more than a foot high), 
marching to the holy land, a countless host of cru- 
saders. The earth-song of the cricket comes up 
through all, and ever and anon the hot z-ing of the 
locust is heard. The dry, deserted fields are one 
mass of yellow like a color shoved to one side on 
Nature's palette. You literally v/ade in flowers 
knee-deep, and now the moist banks and low bot- 
toms are beginning to be abundantly sugared with 
the Aster Tradescanti. How ineffectual is the note 
of a bird now ! We hear it as if we heard it not 
and forget it immediately. The blackbirds were 
pruning themselves and splitting their throats in 
vain, trying to sing as the other day ; all the mel- 
ody flew off in splinters. By the first week of 
October, the hue of maturity has come even to 
that fine, silver-topped, feathery grass, two or three 
feet high in clumps, on dry places ; I am riper for 
thought too. Every thing, all fruits and leaves, 
even the surfaces of stone and stubble, are all ripe 
in this ah. The chickadees of late have winter 



SPRING AND AUTUMN. 93 

ways, flocking , after you." " Birds generally wear 
the russet dress of nature at this season (Novem- 
ber 7), they have their fall no less than the plants ; 
the bright tmts depart from their foliage of feath- 
ers, and they flit past like withered leaves in rust- 
ling flocks. The sparrow is a withered leaf. When 
the flower season is over, when the great company 
of flower-seekers have ceased their search, the 
fringed gentian raises its blue face above the with- 
ering grass beside the brooks for a moment, having 
at the eleventh hour made up its mind to join the 
planet's floral exhibition. Pieces of water are 
now reservoirs of dark indigo ; as for the dry oak- 
leaves, all winter is their fall." 

" The tinkling notes of goldfinches and bobo- 
links which we hear in August are of one charac- 
ter, and peculiar to the season. They are not 
voluminous flowers, but rather nuts of sound, 
ripened seeds of sound. It is the tinkling of 
ripened grains in Nature's basket ; like the sparkle 
on water, a sound produced by friction on the 
crisped air. The cardinals (^Lobelia cardinalis) 
are fluviatile, and stand along some river or brook 
like myself. It is the three o'clock of the year 
when the Bidens Beckii (water marigold) begins 
to prevail. By mid-October, the year is acquiring 
a grizzly look from the climbing mikania, golden- 
rods, and Andropogon scoparius (purple wood- 



94 TEOREAU. 

grass). And painted ducks, too, often come to 
sail and float amid the painted leaves. Surely, 
while geese fly overhead, we can live here as con- 
tentedly as they do at York factory or Hudson's 
Bay. We shall perchance be as well provisioned 
and have as good society as they. Let us be of 
good cheer then, and expect the annual vessel which 
brings the spring to us, without fail. Goodwin, 
the one-eyed Ajax, and other fishermen, who sit 
thus alone from morning to night at this season, 
must be greater philosophers than the shoemakers. 
The streets are thickly strewn with elm and but- 
ton-wood and other leaves, feuille-morte color. 
And what is acorn color ? Is it not as good as 
chestnut ? Now (the second November week) 
for twinkling light reflected from unseen windows 
in the horizon in early twilight. The frost seems 
as if the earth was letting off steam after the sum- 
mer's work is over. If you do feel any fire at this 
season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it 
is your own. November, eat-heart, — is that the 
name of it? A man will eat his heart in this, if 
in any month. The old she-wolf is nibbling at 
your very extremities. The frozen ground eating 
away the soles of your shoes is only typical of the 
Nature that gnaws your heart. Going through a 
partly frozen meadow near the river, scraping the 
sweet-gale, I am pleasantly scented with its odorif- 



SPEINQ AND AUTUMN. 95 

erous fruit. The smallest QAspleniuni) ferDs under 
a shelving rock, pinned on rosette- wise, looked like 
the head of a breast-pin. The rays from the bare 
twigs across the pond are bread and cheese to 
me. . . . I see to the bone. See those bare 
birches prepared to stand the winter through on 
the bare hill-side. They never sing, ' What is this 
dull town to me ? ' The maples skirting the meadow 
(in dense phalanxes) look like light infantry ad- 
vanced for a swamp fight. Ah I dear November, 
ye must be sacred to the Nine, surely." 

" If you would know what are my winter 
thoughts, look for them in the partridge's crop. 
The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown 
to us like a bone to a famishing dog. I go bud- 
ding like a partridge. Some lichenous thoughts 
still adhere to us, our cold immortal evergreens. 
Even our experience is something like wintering in 
the 2^ack, and we assume the spherical form of the 
marmot. We have ]3eculiarly long and clear sil- 
very twilights, morn and eve, with a stately with- 
drawn after redness, — it is indigoy along the 
horizon. . . . Wachusett looks like a right whale 
over our bow, ploughing the continent with his 
flukes well down. He has a vicious look, as 
if he had a harpoon in him. All waters now soiii 
through the leafless trees are blue as indigo, reser- 
voirs of dark indigo among the general russet, red- 



9b THOREAU. 

dish-brown, and gray. I rode home on a hay 
rigging with a boy who had been collecting a load 
of dry leaves for the hog-pen, — this, the third or 
fourth ; two other boys asked leave to ride, with 
four large, empty box-traps, which they were bring- 
ing home from the woods. They had caught five 
rabbits this fall, baiting with an apple. Some fine 
straw-colored grasses, as delicate as the down on 
a young man's cheek, still rise above this crusted 
snow. I look over my shoulder upon an arctic 
scene. . . . The winters come now as fast as 
snow-flakes ; there is really but one season in our 
hearts. The snow is like a uniform white napkin 
in many fields. I see the old, pale-faced farmer 
walking beside his team (in the sled), with con- 
tented thoughts, for the five thousandth time. This 
drama every day in the streets. This is the the- 
atre I go to." 



PHILOSOPHY. 97 



CHAPTER YII. 



PHILOSOPHY. 



" La genie c'est la patience. " — Buffox. 

*' As lie liad kyked on the newe ruone." — Cpiaucer. 

" TT was summer, and now again it is winter. 
Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never 
tires of repeating it. So sweet and wholesome is 
the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory 
and perfect, that her children will never weary of 
it. What a poem ! an epic, in blank verse, inscribed 
with uncounted thikling rhymes. It is solid beauty. 
It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of a million 
years of the gods, and not a single superfluous 
ornament remains. The severest and coldest of 
the immortal critics shot their arrows at and pruned 
it, till it cannot be amended. We might expect 
to find in the snows the footprint of a life supe- 
rior to our own ; of which no zoology takes cogni- 
zance ; a life which pursued does not* earth itself. 
The hollows look like a glittering shield set round 
with brilliants, as we go south-westward through 
the Cassandra swamps toward the declining sun, 
in the midst of which we walked. That beautiful 



98 TEOREAU. 

frost-work, which so frequently in winter morn- 
ings is seen bristling about the throat of every 
breathing-hole in the earth's surface, is the frozen 
breath of the earth upon its beard. I knew what 
it was by my own experience. Some grass culms 
eighteen inches or two feet high, which nobody 
noticed, are an inexhaustible supply of slender ice 
wands set in the snow. The waving lines within 
the marsh-ice look sometimes just like some white, 
shaggy wolf-skin. The fresh, bright chestnut fruit 
of some lichens, glistening in moist winter days, 
brings life and immortality to light. The sight of 
the masses of yellow hastate leaves and flower- 
buds of the yellow lily, already four or six inches 
long at the bottom of the river, reminds me that 
Nature is prepared for an infinity of springs yet. 
How interesting a few clean, dry weeds on the 
shore a dozen rods off, seen distinctly against the 
smooth reflecting water between ice I 

" The "surface of the snow everywhere in the 
fields, where it is hard blown, has a fine grain with 
low shelves, like a slate stone that does not split 
well ; also, there are some shell-like drifts, more 
than once round. Over the frozen river only the 
bridges are seen peeping out from time to time 
like a dry eyelid. The damp, driving snow-flakes, 
when we turned partly round and faced them, hurt 
our eyeballs as if they had been dry scales : there 



PHILOSOPHT. 99 

are plenty of those sliell-like drifts along the south 
sides of the walls now, apd countless perforations, 
sometimes like the prows of vessels, or the folds 
of a white napkin or counterpane dropped over a 
bonneted head. Snow-flakes are the wheels of 
the storm chariots, the wreck of chariot wheels 
after a battle in the skies ; these glorious spangles, 
the sweeping of heaven's floor. And they all sing, 
melting as they sing, of the mysteries of the number 
six, six, six. He takes up the water of the sea in 
his hand, leaving the salt ; he disperses it in 
mist through the skies ; he recollects and sprinkles 
it like grain in six-rayed snowy stars over the earth, 
there to lie till it dissolves its bonds again. 

" I see great thimbleberry bushes, rising above 
the snow with still a rich, rank bloom on them as 
in July, — hypsethral mildew, elysian fungus ! To 
see the bloom on a thimbleberry thus lasting into 
mid-winter ! What a salve that would make col- 
lected and boxed ! I should not be ashamed to 
have a shrub-oak for my coat-of-arms ; I would 
fain have been wading through the woods and 
fields and conversing with the sane snow. Might 
I aspire to . praise the moderate nymph. Nature I 
I must be like her, — moderate. Who shall criti- 
cise that companion? It is like the hone to the 
knife. There I get my underpinnings laid and 
repaired, cemented and levelled. There is my 



100 THOBEA U. 

country club ; we dine at the sign of the shrub- 
oak, the new Albion House. 

" A little flock of red-polls (Linaria minor) is 
busy picking the seeds of the pig-weed in the 
garden, this driving snow-storm. Well may the 
tender buds attract us at this season, no less than 
partridges, for they are the hope of the year, 
the spring rolled up ; the summer is all packed 
in them. Again and again I congratulate myself 
on my so-called poverty. How can we spare to 
be abroad in the morning red ; to see the forms 
of the leafless eastern trees against the clear sky, 
and hear the cocks crow, when a thin low mist 
hangs over the ice and frost in meadows ? When 
I could sit in a cold chamber, muffled in a cloak, 
each evening till Thanksgiving time, warmed by 
my own thoughts, the world was not so much with 
me. When I have onl}^ a rustling oak-leaf, or the 
faint metallic cheep of a tree-sparrow, for variety 
in my winter walk, my life becomes continent and 
SAveet as the kernel of a nut. Show me a man 
who consults his genius, and j^ou have shown me 
a man who cannot be advised. . . . Going along 
the Nut Meadow, or Jimmy Miles road, when I 
see the sulphur lichens on the rails brightening 
with the moisture, I feel like studying them again 
as a relisher or tonic, to make life go down and 
digest well, as Ave use pepper and vmegar and 



PHILOSOPHY. 101, 

salads. They are a sort of winter-greens, which 
we gather and assimilate with our eyes. The flat- 
tened boughs of the white-pine rest stratum above 
stratum like a cloud, a green mackerel-sky, hardly 
reminding me of the concealed earth so far beneath. 
They are like a flaky crust to the earth ; my 63^68 
nibble the piney sierra which makes the horizon's 
edge, as a hungry man nibbles a cracker. . . . 
That bird (the hawk) settles with confidence on 
the white-pine top, and not upon your weather- 
cock ; that bird will not be poultry of yours, lays 
no eggs for you, for ever hides its nest. Though 
willed or ivild^ it is not wilful m its wildness. The 
unsympathizing man regards the wildness of some 
animals, their strangeness to him, as a sin. No- 
hawk that soars and steals our poultry is wilder 
than genius ; and none is more persecuted, or above 
persecution. It can never be poet-laureate, to say 
" pretty Poll," and " Poll want a cracker." 

In these sayings may his life best be sought. It 
is an autobiography with the genuine brand, — 
it is unconscious. How he was affected by the 
seasons, who walked with them as a familiar 
friend, thinking thus aloud the thoughts which 
they brought ; associations in linked sweetness 
long drawn out ; dear and delightful as memories 
or hopes ! He had few higher sources of inspira- 
tion than night, and having given a prayer of his 



102 THOREAU. 

to the moon, see what one evening furnishes : it 
is the first week in September. 

" The air is very still, a fine sound of crickets, 
but not loud. The woods and single trees are 
heavier masses than in the spring, — night has more 
allies. I hear only a tree-toad or sparrow singing 
at long intervals, as in spring. Now in the fields 
I see the white streak of the neottia in the white 
twilight. The whippoorwill sings far ofP. I hear 
the sound from time to time of a leaping fish or 
a frog, or a muski*at or a turtle. I know not how 
it is that this universal cricket's creak should 
sound thus regularly intermittent, as if for the 
most part they fell in with one another and creaked 
in time, making a certain pulsing sound, a sort of 
breathing or panting of all nature. You sit twenty 
feet above the still river, see the sheeny pads and 
the moon and some bare tree-tops in the distant 
horizon. Those bare tree-tops add greatly to the 
wildness. 

" Lower down I see the moon in the water as 
bright as in the heavens, only the water-bugs dis- 
turb its disk, and now I catch a faint glassy glare 
from the whole river surface, which before was sim- 
ply dark. This is set in a frame of double darkness 
in the east ; i.e.^ the reflected shore of woods and 
hills and the reality, the shadow and the substance 
bi-partite, answering to each. I see the northern 



PHILOSOPHY. 103 

lights over my shoulder to remind me of the Esqui 
maux, and that they are still my contemporaries 
on this globe ; that they, too, are taking their walks 
on another part of the planet, in pursuit of seals 
perchance. It was so soft and velvety a light as 
contained a thousand placid days recently put to 
rest in the bosom of the water. So looked the 
North-twin Lake in the Maine woods. It reminds 
me of placid lakes in the mid-noon of Indian 
summer days, but yet more placid and civiHzed, 
suggesting a higher cultivation, as wildness ever 
does, which aeons of summer days have gone to 
make, like a summer day seen far away. All the 
effects of sunUght, with a softer tone, and all the 
stillness of the water and air superadded, and 
the witchery of the hour. What gods are they 
that require so fair a vase of gleaming water to 
their prospect in the midst of the wild woods 
by night? 

" Else why this beauty allotted to night, a gem 
to sparkle in the zone of JSfox? They are strange 
gods now out; methinks their names are not in 
any mytholog3\ The light that is in night, a smile 
as in a dream on the face of the sleeping lake, 
enough light to show what we see, any more would 
obscure these objects. I am not advertised of any 
deficiency of light. The faint sounds of birds 
dreaming aloud in the night, the fresh cool aii' and 



104 THOEEAU. 

sound of tlie wind rushing over the rocks remind 
me of the tops of mountains. In this faint, hoary 
light all fields are like a mossy rock and remote 
from the cultivated plains of day. It is all one 
with Caucasus, the slightest hill-pastare. 

" Now the fire in the north increases wonder- 
fully, not shooting up so much as creeping along, 
like a fire on the mountains of the north, seen afar 
in the night. The Hyperborean gods are burning 
brush, and it spread, and all the hoes in heaven 
couldn't stop it. It spread from west to east, over 
the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay 
across the northern sky, broken into many pieces ; 
and each piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, 
strove to advance itself towards the east, worm- 
like on its own annular muscles. It has spread 
into the choicest wood-lots of Valhalla ; now it 
shoots up like a single, solitary watch-fire, or 
burning brush, or where it ran up a pine-tree like 
powder, and still it continues to gleam here and 
there like a fat stump in the burning, and is re- 
flected in the water. . And now I see the gods by 
great exertions have got it under, and the stars 
have come out without fear in peace. Though no 
birds sing, the crickets vibrate their shrill and 
stridulous cymbals in the alders of the cause- 
way, those minstrels especially engaged for night's 
quire." 



PHILOSOPHY, 105 

He saw the great in the little : the translucent 
leaves of the Andromeda calyculata seemed in 
January, with their soft red, more or less brown, 
as he walked towards the sun, like cathedral win- 
dows ; and he spoke of the cheeks and temples of 
the soft crags of the sphagnum. The hubs on 
birches are regular cones, as if they might be vol- 
canoes in outline ; and the small cranberries occupy 
some little valley a foot or two over, between two 
mountains of sphagnum (that dense, cushion-like 
moss that grows in swamps). He says distant 
lightning is like veins in the eye. Of that excel- 
lent nut, the chestnut, " the Avhole upper slopes of 
the nuts are covered with the same hoary wool as 
the points." A large, fresh stone-heap, eight or 
ten inches above water, is quite sharp, like Tene- 
riffe. These comparisons to him-were realities, not 
sports of the pen : to elevate the so-called little 
into the great, with him, was genius. In that 
sense he was no humorist. He sees a gull's wings, 
that seem almost regular semicircles, like tlie new 
moon. Some of the bevelled roofs of the houses 
on Cape Ann are so nearly flat that they reminded 
him of the low brows of monkeys. The enlarged 
sail of the boat suggests a new power, like a Gre- 
cian god. . . . Ajacean. The boat is like a plough 
drawn by a winged bull. He asks, '•'• Are there no 
purple reflections from the culms of thought in my 



106 THOREAU. 

mind?" thinking of the colors of the poke-stem. 
In a shower he feels the first drop strike the right 
slope of his nose, and run down the ravine there, 
and says, " Such is the origin of rivers," and sees 
a wave whose whole height, "from the valley be- 
tween to the top," was fifteen inches. He thus 
practically illustrates his faith, — how needless to 
travel for wonders; they lie at your feet; the 
seeing eye must search intentl3^ The Wayland 
bird-stuffer shoots a meadow-hen, a Virginia rail, 
a stormy petrel and the little auk^ in Sudbury 
meadows. 

He wished so to live as to derive his satisfac- 
tions and inspirations from the commonest events, 
e very-day phenomena ; so that what his senses 
hourly perceived, his daily walk, the conversation 
of his neighbors, might inspire him ; and he 
wished to dream of no heaven but that which lay 
about him. Seeing how impatient, how rampant, 
how precocious were the osiers in early spring, he 
utters the praj^er, " May I ever be in as good spir- 
its as a willow. They never say die." The charm 
of the journal must consist in a certain greenness, 
thorough freshness, and not in maturity. " Here, 
I cannot afford to be remembering what I said, 
did, my scurf cast off, — but what I am and aspire 
to become." Those annoyed by his hardness 
should remember that " the flowing of the sap 



PHILOSOPHY, 107 

under the dull rinds of the trees is a tide which 
few suspect." The same object is ugly or beauti- 
ful according to the angle from which you view it. 
He went to the rocks by the pond in April to 
smell the catnep, and always brought some home 
for the cat, at that season. To truly see his char- 
acter, you must " see with the unworn sides of 
your eye." Once he enlarges a little on an offer 
he did not accept of a passenger. He had many : 
genial gentlemen of all sizes felt ready to walk or 
sail with him, and he usually accepted them, some- 
times two in one. On this occasion he declines : 

" This company is obliged to make a distinction 
between dead freight and passengers : I will take 
almost any amount of freight for you cheerfully, — 
any thing, my dear sir, but yourself. You are a 
heavy fellow, but I am well disposed. If you could 
go without going, then you might go. There 's 
the captain's state-room, empty to be sure, and you 
say you could go in the steerage : I know very 
well that only your baggage would be dropped 
in the steerage, while you would settle down into 
that vacant recess. Why, I am going,, not staying ; 
I have come on purpose to sail, to paddle away 
from such as you, and you have waylaid me on 
the shore. ... If I remember aright it was ordy 
on condition that you were ashed,, that you were to 
go with a man one mile or twain. 



lOS TUOREAU. 

I could better cany a heaped load of meadow mud 
and sit on the thole-pins." 

He believed, '^ We mu5>t not confound man with 
man. We cannot conceive of a greater difference 
than that between the life of one man and that of 
another.'' 

'' It is possible for a man wholly to disappear 
and be merged in his manners." lie thought a man 
of manners icas an inseet in a tumbler. But genius 
had evanescent boundaries like an altar from which 
incense rises. 

" Our stock in life, our real estate, is tluit amount 
of thought which we have had, and which we have 
thought out. The ground we have thus created is 
for ever pasturage for our thoughts. I am often 
reminded that, if I had bestowed on me the wealth 
of Croesus, my aims must still be the same and my 
means essentially the same. The art of life, of a 
poet's life, is, not having any thing to do, to do 
something. Improve the suggestion of each object 
however humble, however slight and transient the 
provocation ; w^hat else is there to be improved ? 
You must try a thousand themes before you find 
the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns 
to get one oak. Both for bodily and mental health 
court the present. Embrace health wherever you 
find her. None but the kind gods can make me 
sane. If onlv thev will let their south Avind blow. 



PHILOSOPHY. 109 

on me : I ask to be melted. You can only ask of 
the metals to be tender to the fire that melts them. 
To nought else can they be tender. Only he can 
be trusted with gifts, who can present a face of 
bronze to expectations." 

At times, he asked: "Why does not man sleep 
all day as well as all night, it seems so very easy. 
For what is he awake?" "Do lichens or fungi 
grow on you? " The luxury of wisdom ! the lux- 
ury of virtue ! are there any intemperate in these 
things ? "* Oh such thin skins, such crockery as I 
have to deal with ! Do they not know that I can 
laugh ? " " Why do the mountains never look so 
fair as from my native fields ? " " Who taught 
the oven-bird to conceal her nest ? " He states a 
familiar fact, showing that the notion of a thing 
can be taken for the thing, literally: " I have con- 
vinced myself that I saw smoke issuing from the 
chimney of a house, which had not been occupied 
for twenty years, — a small bluish, whitish cloud, 
instantly dissipated." Like other scribes, he wishes 
he " could huy at the shops some kind of India-rub- 
ber that would rub out at once all that in my ivriting 
which it now costs me so many perusals.^ so many 
months^ if not years^ and so much reluctance to 
erased His temperament is so moral, his least 
observation will breed a sermon, or a water-worn 
fish rear him to Indian heights of philosophy: 



110 THOREAU. 

" How many springs shall I continue to see the 
common sucker (^Catostomus Bostoniensis) floating 
dead on our river? Will not Nature select her 
types from a new font ? The vignette of the year. 
This earth which is spread out like a map around 
me is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed. 
In me is the sucker that I see. No wholly extra- 
neous object can compel me to recognize it. I am 
guilty of suckers. . . . The red-bird which I saw 
on my companion's string on election-days, I 
thought but the outmost sentinel of the wild im- 
mortal camp, of the wild and dazzling infantry of 
the wilderness. The red-bird which is the last of 
nature is but the first of God. We condescend to 
climb the crags of earth." 

He believes he is soothed by the sound of the 
rain, because he is allied to the elements. The 
sound sinks into his spirit as the water into the 
earth, reminding him of the season when snow and 
ice will be no more. He advises you to be not in 
haste amid your private affairs. Consider the tur- 
tle : a whole summer, June, July, and August are 
not too good, not too much to hatch a turtle in. 
Another of his questions is : " What kind of un- 
derstanding was there between the mind that deter- 
mined that these leaves of the black willow should 
hang on during the winter, and that of the worm 
that fastened a few of these leaves to its cocoon in 



PHILOSOPHY. Ill 

order to disguise it ? " As an answer may be found 
the following : ''It was long ago in a full senate 
of all intellects determined how cocoons had best 
be suspended, kindred mind with mind that admires 
and approves decided it so. The mind of the uni- 
verse ivhich we share has been intended on each par- 
ticular pointy Thus persevering, — and, as he 
sajs of a dwelling on the Cape, he knocked all 
round the house at five doors in succession, — so 
at the great out-doors of nature, where he was 
accommodated. 

" Chide me not, laborious band, 
For the idle flowers I brought ; 
Every aster in my hand . 

Goes home loaded with a thought." 

His fineness of perceiving, his delicacy of touch, 
has rarely been surpassed with pen or pencil, a 
fineness as unpremeditated as successful. For 
him the trout glances like a film from side to side 
and under the bank. The pitch oozing from pine 
logs is one of the beautiful accidents that attend 
on man's works, instead of a defilement. Darby's 
oak stands like an athlete, it is an agony of strength. 
Its branches look like stereotyped gray lightning 
on the sky. The lichens on the pine remind him 
of the forest warrior and his shield adhering to 
him. 

In spring he notices pewee days and April show- 



112 TEOBEAU. 

ers. The mountains are the pastures to which he 
drives his thoughts, on their 20th of May. So the 
storm has its flashing van follov^^ecl by the long 
dropping main body, with at very long intervals an 
occasional firing or skirmishing in the rear, or on 
the flank. " The lightning like a yellow spring 
flower illumines the dark banks of the clouds. 
Some sestrum stings the cloud that she darts head- 
long against the steeples, and bellows hollowly, 
making the earth tremble. It is the familiar note 
of another warbler echoing amid the roofs." He 
compares the low universal twittering of the chip- 
birds, at daybreak in June, to the bursting bead on 
the surface of the uncorked day.. If he wishes for 
a hair for his compass-sight, he must go to the sta- 
ble ; but the hair-bird, with her sharp eyes, goes to 
the road. He muses over an ancient muskrat 
skull (found behind the wall of Adams's shop), and 
is amused with the notion of what grists have come 
to this mill. Now the upper and nether stones fall 
loosely apart, and the brain chamber where the 
miller lodged is now empty (passing under the 
portcullis of the incisors), and the windows are 
gone. The opening of the first asters, he thinks, 
makes you fruitfully meditative; helps condense 
your thoughts like the mildews in the afternoon. 
He is pretty sure to find a plant which he is shown 
from abroad or hears of, or in any way becomes 



PHILOSOPHY, 113 

interested in. The cry of hounds he lists to, as it 
were a distant natural horn in the clear resonant 
air. He says that fire is the most tolerable third 
party. When he puts the hemlock boughs on the 
blaze, the rich salt crackling of its leaves is like 
mustard to the ear, — dead trees love the fire. 
The distant white-pines over the Sanguinetto 
seem to flake into tiers ; the Avhole tree looks like 
an open cone. The pond reminds him, looking 
from the mill-dam, of a weight wound up ; and 
when the miller raised the gate, what a smell of 
gun-wash or sulphur ! " I who never partake of 
the sacrament made the more of it." The soli- 
tude of Truro is as sweet as a flower. He drank 
at every cooler spring in his walk in a blazing 
July, and loved to eye the bottom there, with its 
pebbly Caddis- worm cases, or its white worms, or 
perchance a luxurious frog cooling himself next 
his nose. The squirrel withdraws to his eye by 
his aerial turnpikes. " The roof of a house at a 
distance, in March, is a mere gray scale, diamond 
shape against the side of a hill." " If I were 
to be a frog-hawk for a month, I should soon have 
known something^ about the froQ:s." He thinks 
most men can keep a horse, or keep up a certain 
fashionable style of living, but few indeed can 
keep .up great expectations. He improves every 
opportunity to go into a grist-mill, any excuse to 



114 THOREAU. 

see its cobweb-tapestiy, such as putting questions 
to the miller, while his eye rests delighted in the 
cobwebs above his head and perchance on his hat. 
So he walked and sang his melodies in the pure 
country, in the seclusion of the field. All forms 
and aspects of night and day were glad and mem- 
orable to him, whose thoughts were as pure and 
innocent as those of a guileless maiden. Shall 
they not be studied ? 

" I will give my son to eat 
Best of Pan's immortal meat, 
Bread to eat, and juice to drink ; 
So the thoughts that he shall think 
Shall not be forms of stars, but stars, 
Not pictm-es pale, but Jove and Mars. 



The Indian cheer, the frosty skies. 
Bear purer wits, inventive eyes. 

In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong 
Adhere like this foundation strong. 
The insanity of towns to stem 
With simpleness for stratagem." 

If it IS difficult (to some) to credit, it is no less 
certain that Thoreau would indulge himself in a 
rhapsody, — given the right topic, something the 
writer cordially appreciated. In speech or with 
the p>en, the eloquent vein being touched, the spring 
of discourse flowed rapidly, as on this subject of the 
Corner-road : — 

" Now I yearn for one of those old, meandering^ 



PHILOSOPHY. 115 

dry, uninliabited roads which lead away from towns, 
which lead us away from temptation, which con- 
duct to the outside of the earth over its uj)permost 
crust ; where you may forget in what country you 
are travelling ; where no farmer can complain that 
you are treading down his grass ; no gentleman 
who has recently constructed a seat in the country 
that you are trespassing, on which you can go off 
at half-cock and wave adieu to the village ; along 
which you may travel like a pilgrim going no- 
whither ; where travellers are not often to be met, 
where my spirit is free, where the walls and flow- 
ers are not cared for, where your head is more in 
heaven than your feet are on earth ; which have 
long reaches, where you can see the approaching 
traveller half a mile off, and be prepared for him ; 
not so luxuriant a soil as to attract men ; some 
stump and root fences, which do not need atten- 
tion ; where travellers have no occasion to stop, 
but pass along and leave you to your thoughts ; 
where it makes no odds which way you face, 
whether you are going or coming, whether it is 
morning or evening, mid-noon or midnight ; where 
earth is cheap enough by being public ; where you 
can walk and think with least obstruction, there 
being nothing to measure progress by ; where you 
can pace when your breast is full, and cherish your 
moodiness ; where you are not in false relations 



110 THOBEAU, 

with men, are not dining or conversing with them ; 
by which von may go to the uttermost parts of the 
earth. 

** Sometimes it is some particular lialf-dozen rods 
w hich I Avish to hnd myself pacing over, as where' 
certain airs blow, there my hfe will come to me ; 
methinks, like a hunter, I lie in ^vait for it. When 
I am against this bare promonotory of a huckleberry 
hill, then forsooth my thoughts ^^ ill expand. Is 
it some inlluence as a vapor which exhales from 
tlie ground, or somethinq: in the q:ales a\ hich blow 
there, or in all thino's tliere brought toi^ether as^ree- 
ably to my spirit ? The walls must not be too 
high, imprisoning me, but low, with numerous 
gaps. The trees must not be too numerous nor 
the hills too near, bounding the view; nor the soil 
too rich, attracting the attention to the earth. It 
must simply be the way and the lite, — a way that 
was never known to be repaired, nor to need repair, 
within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. I 
cannot walk habitually in those ways that are likely 
to be repaired, for sure it Avas the devil only that 
wore them ; never by the heel of thinkers Qof 
thought) were they worn. The sauntercr wears 
out no road, even though lie travel on it, and 
therefore should pay no highw^aj* (or rather low- 
way) tax ; he may be taxed to construct a higher 
way than that men travel. A way which no geese 



riiiLo^oriiY. Ill 

dofilo or hiss along it, but only sometimes their 
wild brethren fly far overhead ; which the kingbird 
and the swallow twitter over, and the song-sparrow 
sings on its rails ; where the small red butterfly 
is at home on the yarrow, and no boy threatens it 
with imprisoning hat, — there I can walk and 
stalk and plod. Which nobody but Jonas Potter 
travels beside me ; where no cow but his is tempted 
to linger for the herbage by its side ; where the 
guide board is fallen, and now the hand points to 
heaven significantly, to a Sudbury and Marlboro' 
in the skies. That 's a road I can travel, that 
the particular Sudbury I am bound for, six miles 
an hour, or two, as you please ; and few there be 
that enter therein. Here I can walk and recover 
the lost child that I am, without any ringing of a 
bell. Where there was nothing ever discovered 
to detain a traveller, but all went through about 
their business ; where I never passed " the time 
of day " with any, — indifferent to me were the 
arbitrary divisions of time ; where Tullus Hos- 
tilius might have disappeared, at any rate has 
never been seen, — the road to the Corner! 

" The ninety and nine acres you go through to 
get there, — I would rather see it again, though I 
saw it this morning, than Gray's Churchyard. The 
road whence you may hear a stake-driver, or whip- 
poorwill, a rpiail, in a midsummer day. Oh, yes I 



118 THOBEAU. 

a quail comes nearest to the Gum-c bird heard 
there. Where it would not be sport for a sports- 
man to go (and the Mayweed looks up in my face 
not there). The pale lobelia and the Canada 
snap-dragon, a little hardback and meadow-sweet, 
peep over the fence, nothing more serious to ob- 
struct the view, and thimbleberries are the food 
of thought (before the drought), along by the 
walls. A road that passes over the Height-of- 
land, between earth and heaven, separating those 
streams which flow earthward from those which 
flow heavenward. 

" It is those who go to Brighton and to market 
that wear out all the roads, and they should pay 
all the tax. The deliberate pace of a walker never 
made a road the worse for travelling on, — on the 
promenade deck of the world, an outside passenger ; 
where I have freedom in my thought, and in my 
soul am free. Excepting the omnipresent butcher 
with his calf-cart, followed by a distracted and 
anxious cow, — the inattentive stranger baker, 
whom no weather detains, that does not bake his 
bread in this hemisphere, and therefore it is dry 
before it gets here ! Ah ! there is a road where 
you might adventure to fly, and make no prepa- 
rations till the time comes ; where your wings will 
sprout if anywhere, where your feet are not con- 
fined to earth. An airy head makes light walking, 



PHILOSOPHY. 119 

when I am not confined and baulked by the sight 
of distant farm-houses, which I have not gone past. 
I must be fancy free ; I must feel that, wet or 
dry, high or low, it is the genuine surface of the 
planet, and not a little chip-dirt or a compost heap, 
or made land, or redeemed. A thinker's weight is 
in his thought, not in his tread ; when he thinks 
freely, his body weighs nothing. He cannot tread 
down your grass, farmers ! " 

" Thus far to day your favors reach, 
fair appeasing presences ! 
Ye taught my lips a single speech 
And a thousand silences." 



120 THOREAU. 



CHAPTER YIII. 



WALKS AND TALKS. 

" Absents within the line conspire." — Vaughan. 

"What I have reaped in my journey is, as it were, a small contentment in 
a never-contenting subject; a bitter-pleasant taste of a sweet-seasone<l 
sour. All in all, what I found was more than ordinary rejoicing, in an 
extraordinary sorrow of delights." — Lithgow. 

" "What is it to me that I can write these Table-Talks ? Others have 
more property in them than I have : they may reaj) the benefit, / have had 
only the pain. Nor should I know that I had ever thought at all, but that 
I am reminded of it by the strangeness of my appearance and my unfitness 
for any thing else." — Hazlitt. 

" Not mine the boast of countless herds, 
Nor purple tapestries, nor treasures gold, 
But mine the peaceful spirit. 
And the dear muse, and pleasant wine 
Stored in Boeotian urns." — Bacchylides. 

'"T^O furnish a more familiar idea of Tlioreau's 
-*- walks and talks with his friends and their 
locality, some reports of them are furnished for 
convenience in the interlocutory form. 



SECOND DIVISIOK BROOK. 

And so you are ready for a walk ? 

" Hence sand and dust are sliak'd for witnesses." 

When was I ever not ? Where shall we go ? 
To Conantum or White Pond, or is the Second Di- 
vision our business for this afternoon ? 



WALES AND TALKS. 121 

As 3^ou will. Under your piloting I feel par- 
tially safe ; but not too far, not too much. Brevity 
is the sole of walking. 

And yet all true walking, all virtuous walking, 
is a ti^avail. The season is proper to the Brook. I 
am in the mood to greet the Painted Tortoise ; nor 
must I fail to examine the buds of the marsh mari- 
gold, now, I think, somewhat swollen. But few 
birds have come in, though Minot says he has heard 
a bluebird. 

Did he ask his old question, — Seen a robin ? 
Minot is native and to the manor born ; was never 
away from home but once, when he was drafted 
as a soldier in the last war, and when he went to 
Dorchester Heights, and has never ridden on a 
rail. What do you make of him ? 

He makes enough of himself. The railroad has 
proved too great a temptation for most of our far- 
mers : the young men have a foreign air their fathers 
ncA^er had. We shall not boast of 3Iors Ipse, 
Grass and Oats, or Oats and Grass, and old Verjuice, 
in the next generation. These rudimental Saxons 
have the air of pine-trees and apple-trees, and might 
be their sons got between them, — conscientious 
laborers, with a science born within them, from out 
the sap-vessels of their savage sires. This savagery 
is native with man, and polished New England 
cannot do without it. That makes the charm of 
6 



122 THOREAU. 

grouse-sliooting and deer-stalking to those Lord 
Breadalbanes, walking out of their doors one hun- 
dred miles to the sea, on their own property ; or 
Dukes of Sutherland getting off at last their town- 
coat, donning their hunters' gear, exasperated by- 
saloons and dress-coats. 

Let me rest a fraction on the bridge. 

I am your well-wisher in that. The manners 
of water are beautiful. " As for beauty, I need 
not look beyond my oar's length for my fill of it." 
As I heard my companion say this, my eye rested 
on the charming play of light on the water which 
he was slowly striking with his paddle. I fancied 
that I had never seen such color, such transpar- 
ency, such eddies. It was the hue of Rhine wities, 
it was gold and green, and chestnut and hazel, in 
bewildering succession and rehef, without cloud or 
confusion. A little canoe, with three men or boys 
in it, put out frorh a creek and paddled down 
stream, and afar and near we paid homage to the 
" Blessed Water," inviolable, magical, whose na- 
ture is beauty, which instantly began to play its 
sweet games, all circles and dimples, and lively 
gleaming motions, always Ganges, the Sacred 
Hiver^ and which cannot be desecrated or made to 
forget itself; " For marble sweats and rocks have 
tears." 

Hark ! Was that the bluebird's warble ? 



WALKS AND TALES. 123 

I could not hear it, as now cometh the seventh 
abomination, the train. 

And yet it looks like a new phenomenon, though 
it has appeared at the same hour each day for these 
ten years. 

Already the South Acton passengers squeeze 
their bundles, and the member of the legislature 
hastens to drain the last drop of vulgar gossip from 
the Ginger-beer paper before he leaves the cars to 
fodder and milk his kine. I trust that in heaven 
will be no cows. They are created, apparently, to 
give the farmer a sport between planting and har- 
vest, the joy of haying, dust, grime, and tan, diluted 
by sun strokes. 

The cause of cows is, that they make good walk- 
ing where they feed. In the paths of the thicket 
the best engineer is the cow. 

We cross where the high bank will give us a 
view over the river at Clam-shell, and where I 
may possibly get an arrow-head from this Concord 
Kitchen-modding. 

A singular proclivity, thou worshipper of In- 
dians ! for arrow-heads ; and I presume, like cer- 
tain other worships, un curable ! 

Apply thy Procrustes-bed to my action, and per- 
mit me to continue my search. They speak of 
Connecticuts and Hudsons : our slow little stream, 
in its spring overflow, draws on the surtout of 



124 TEOREAU, 

greater rivers ; a river, — fair, solitary path, — the 
one piece of real estate belonging to the walker, 
unfenced, nn deeded, sacred to musquash and pick- 
erel, and George Melvin, gunner, more by the 
token he was drowned in it. 

Are not those gulls, gleaming like spots of in- 
tense white light, far away on th^ dark bosom of 
the meadows ? 

Yes, indeed ! they come from the sea each 
spring overflow, and go a-fishing like Goodwin. 
See ! I have got a quartz arrow-head, — and perfect. 
This bank is made of the clams baked by the Indi- 
ans. Let us look a moment at the minnows as we 
cross the brook ; I can see their shadows on the 
yellow sand much clearer than themselves, and can 
thus count the number of their fins. I wonder if 
the Doctor ever saw a minnow. In his report on 
reptiles, he says he has never seen but one 
Hylodes Pickeringii, in a dried state. It is well 
also to report upon what you have not seen. He 
never troubled himself with looking- about in the 
country. The poet more than the savant marries 
man to nature. I wish we had some fuller word 
to express this fine picture we see from Clam-shell 
bank: kinde was the old English word, but we 
do not designate the power that works for beauty 
alone, whilst man works only for use. 

See, O man of nature ! yon groups of weather- 



WALKS AND TALKS. 125 

stained houses we now o'ertop. There live some 
Christians, put away on life's plate like so many 
rinds of cheese ; there descend, like dew on flow- 
ers, the tranquillizing years, into their prickly life- 
petals. Save the rats scrabbling along the old 
plastering, the sawing of pluvial pea-liens, or the 
low of the recuperating cow, what repose ! And 
in the midst, such felons of destiny, — 

** O mother Ida, hearken ere I die." 

What avails against hot-bread, cream-of-tartar, 
and Oriental-company tea, with an afternoon nap ? 
I have met CEnones whom I could have spared 
better than these horn-pouts of gossip. 

Is there a fixed sum of hyson allotted to each 
sibyl ? 

" Only a learned and a manly soul 

I purposed her, that should with even powers 
The rock, the spindle, and tlie shears control 
Of Destiny, and spin her own full hours." 

The bluebird, sir ! the first bluebird I there he 
sits and warbles. Dear bird of spring, first speech 
of the original beauty, first note in the annual con- 
cert of love, why soundest thy soft and plaintive 
warble on my ear, like the warning of a mournful 
past ? 

As the poet sings, if not of the new birds : — 

*' We saw thee in thy balmy nest, 
Bright dawn of our eternal day ; 



126 THOREAU. 

We saw thine eyes break from their east. 
And chase the trembhng shades away : 
We saw thee, and we blest the sight, 
We saw thee by thine own sweet liglit. 

She sings thy tears asleep, and dips 

Her kisses in thy weeping eye ; 
She spreads the red leaves of thy lips, 

That in their buds yet blushing lie : 
She 'gainst those mother diamonds tries 
The points of her young eagle's eyes." 

Excuse soliloquy. 

Go on, go on : I can hear the bluebird just the 
same. 

I am glad we are at the sand-bank. Radiantly 
here the brook parts across the shallows its ever- 
rippling tresses of golden light. It steals away 
my battered senses as I gaze therein ; and, if I re- 
member me, 'tis in some murmuring line ; — 

" Thus swam away my thoughts on thee, 
And in thy joyful ecstasy 
Flowed with thy waters to thy sea." 

And the quantity of thy rhyme, I judge. Let 
us to the ancient woods : I say let us value the 
woods. They are full of solicitations. My wood- 
lot has no price, full of mysterious values. What 
forms, what colors, what powers, null to our igno- 
rance, but opening fast enough to our wit. I love 
this smell that comes from the brush of the pitch- 
pine, as the spring sun bakes its first batch of violets 



WALKS AND TALKS. 127 

here. And here is the brook itself, the petted 
darling of the meadows, wild minstrel of an an- 
cient song, poured through the vales for ever. 
The sands of Pactolus were not more golden than 
these of thine, and black the eddying pools, where 
the old experienced trout sleeps on his oars. As 
hurries the water to the sea, so seeks the soul its 
universe. And this is the May-flower, sweet as 
Cytherea's breath ; and in yonder lowlands grows 
the cUmbing fern. Simple flowers ! Yet was not 
Solomon in all his glory arrayed like one of these. 

** To clothe the fiery thought 
In simple word succeeds, 
For still the craft of genius is 
To mask a king in weeds." 

OLD SUDBURY INN. 

There, you have it ! Howe's tavern, on the old 
"Worcester turnpike. I was never before here, au 
revoir ! 

A new place is good property, if we have the 
prospect of owning it, hey, Betty Martin ! 'Tis one 
of the ancient taverns of the noble old Common- 
wealth : observe the date, 1719, painted on the 
sign. From that to this the same family have had 
it in their keeping, and many a glass has been 
drunk and paid for at the bar, whose defence you 
observe moves curiously up and down like a port- 



128 , TEOREAU. 

ciiUis, and tlie room is ceiled all round, instead of 
plastered. There is a seigniorial property attached 
to it, some hundred acres ; and see the old but- 
tresses of time-channelled oak along the road, in 
front, that must have been set at the same time 
with the inn. A spacious brook canters behind 
the house ; yonder is a noble forest ; and there 
above us, Nobscot, our nearest mountain. Indeed, 
the tract across to Boone's Pond and Sudbury is 
all a piece of wild wood. Come, away for Nob- 
scot ! taking the sandy path behind the barn. Do 
you see that strange, embowered roof, peeping out 
of its great vase of apple-blossoms ? for this, O 
man of many cares I is the 23d of May, and just as 
much Blossom- day as ever was. 

I see the peeping chimney, — romance itself. 
May I hope never to know the name of the re- 
markable genius who dwells therein. 

Very proper, no doubt, — Tubs or Scrubs. 

Believe it not, enemy to Blossom-day romance. 
My soul whispers of a fair, peculiar region behind 
those embracing bouquets. 

Where one should surely find an anxious cook 
and a critical family. 

Hush ! hush ! traduce not the venerable groves. 
Here, or in some such devoted solitude, should 
dwell the Muse and compose a treatise on the wor- 
ship of Dryads. 



- WALKS AND TALKS. 129 

• 

Dry as powder-post. Have you seen the scarlet 
tanager ? 

No. 

The Puseyite unmistakable among our birds, — 
true, high-church scarlet. Hear ! the pewee's soft, 
lisping, pee-a-wee ! Now, as we rise and leave the 
splendid chestnut forest, the view opens. Nobscot 
is a true, low mountain, and these small creatures 
look off the best. I love the broad, healthy, new- 
springing pastures, ornamented with a.pple-tree 
pyramids, the pastoral architecture of the cow ; 
the waving saxifrage and delicate houstonia, that 
spring-beauty; and the free, untrammelled air of 
the mountains, — it never swept the dusty plain. 
There's our Cliff and meetmg-house in Concord, 
and Barrett's hill, and Anursnac ; next comes 
high Lincoln with his gleaming spires, and modest 
Wayland low in the grass, the Great Sudbury 
Meadows (sap-green), and Framingham and Na- 
tick. How many dark belts of pines stalk across 
the bosky landscape, like the traditions of the old 
Sagamores, who fished in yonder Long Pond that 
now colors its town with reddish water a country 
boy might bathe in if hard pushed ! 

I faintly hear the sound of the church-going 
bell, I suppose, of Framingham. 

(As the country wife beats her brass pan to col- 
lect her bees.) In the landscape is found the magic 

6* I 



130 THOREAU. 

of color. The world is all opal, and these ethereal 
tints the mountains wear have the finest effects 
of music on us. Mountains are great poets, and 
one glance at this fine New Hampshire range of 
Watatic, Monadnock, Peterboro', and Uncannun- 
nuk, undoes a deal of prose and reiiistates poor, 
wronged men in their rights, life and society begin 
to be illuminated and transparent, and we general- 
ize boldly and well. Space is felt as a privilege. 
There is some pinch and narrowness to the best. 
Here we laugh and leap to see the world, and what 
amplitudes it has of meadow, stream, upland, for- 
est, and sea, which yet are but lanes and crevices 
to the great space in which the world swims like a 
cockboat on the ocean. There below are those 
farms, but the life of farmers is unpoetic. The 
life of labor does not make men, but drudges. 'Tis 
pleasant, as the habits of all poets may testify, to 
think of great proprietors, to reckon this grove we 
walk in a park of the noble ; but a continent cut 
up into ten-acre lots is not attractive. The farmer 
is an enchanted laborer, who, after toiling his 
brains out, sacrificing thought, religion, love, hope, 
courage, to toil, turns out a bankrupt, as well as 
the shopman. 

I must meditate an ode to be called, " Adieu, 
my Johnny-cake." 

Ay, ay: hasty-pudding for the masculine eye, 



WALKS AND TALKS. 131 

chicken and jellies for girls. Yonder on that hill 
is Marlboro', a town (in autumn at least, when I 
visited it) that wears a rich appearance of rustic 
plenty and comfort, — ample farms, good houses, 
profuse yellow apple-heaps, pumpkin mountains in 
every enclosure, orchards left ungathered ; and in 
the Grecian piazzas of the houses, squashes ripen- 
ing between the columns. At Cutting's were oats 
for the horse, but no dinner for men, so we went 
to a chestnut grove and an old orchard for our 
fare. 

Now for an inscription upon 

OLD SUDBURY INN. 

Who set the oaks 

Along the road ? 

Was it not Nature's hand, 

Old Sudbury Inn ? for I have stood 

And wondered at the sight, 

The oaks my delight. 

And the elms, 

So boldly branching to the sky, 

And the interminable forests, 

Old Sudbury Inn ! that wash thee, nigh 

On every side. 

With a green and rustling tide. 

Such oaks ! such elms ! 
And the contenting woods, 



132 TEOREAU. 

And IS'obscot good. 

Old Sudbury Inn ! creature of moods, 

That could I find 

Well suited to the custom of my mind. 

Most homely seat, 
■ Where IsTature eats her frugal meals 
And studies to outwit, 
Old Sudbury Inn ! what thy inside reveals, 
Long mayst thou be 
More than a match for her and me. 

And so it comes every year, this lovely Blossom- 
day:— 

"The cup of life is not so shallow 
That we have drained the best, 
That all the wines at once we swallow, 
And lees make all the rest. 

Maids of as soft a bloom shall many, 

As Hymen yet hath blessed. 
And fairer forms are in the quarry 

Than Angelo released." 

And to-day the air is spotted with the encour- 
aging rigmarole of the bobolink, — that buttery, 
vivacious, fun-may-take-me cornucopia of song. 
Once to hear his larripee, larripee, buttery, scattery, 
wittery, pittery ; some yellow, some black feath- 
ers, a squeeze of air, and this summer warming 
song ! The bobolink never knew cold, and never 



WALKS AND TALKS. 133 

could, — the musician of blossoms. Hark ! the 
veery's liquid strain, with trilling cadence ; his 
holy brother, the wood-thrush, pitches his flute- 
notes in the pine alleys, where at twilight is heard 
the strange prophecy of the whippoorwill. The 
oven-bird beats his brass witcher-twitcher in the 
heated shades of noon, mixed with the feathery 
roll-call of the partridge. As we take our nooning, 
I will recall some lines on this famous bird. 

jS07ig, THE PARTRIDGE. 

Shot of the wood, from thy ambush low, 

Bolt off the dry leaves flying. 
With a whirring spring Uke an Indian's bow, 

Thou speed'st when the year is dying ; 
And thy neat gray form darts whirling past, 
So silent all, as thou fliest fast, 
Snapping a leaf from the copses red, 
Our native bird on the woodlands bred. 

I have trembled a thousand times, 

As thy bolt through the thicket was rending. 
Wondering at thee in the autumn chimes. 

When thy brother's soft wings were bending 
Swift to the groves of the spicy south. 
Where the orange melts in the zephyr's mouth, 
And the azure sunshine humors the air, 
And Winter ne'er sleeps in his pallid chair. 

And thy wliirring wings I liear. 
When the colored ice is warming 



134 TEOREAU. 

The twigs of the forest sere, 

While the northern wind a-storming 
Draws cold as death round the Irish hut 
That lifts its blue smoke in the railroad cut, 
And the hardy chopjDer sits dreaming at home, 
And thou and I are alone in the storm. 

Brave bird of my woodland haunt. 

Good child of the autumn dreary. 
Drum of my city and bass of my chaunt, 

With thy rushing music so cheery, 
Desert not my bowers for the southern flowers, 
Nor my pale northern woods for her ruby hours ; 
Let us bide the rude blast and the ringing hail, 
Till the violets peep on the Indian's trail. 

Aboye our heads the iiight-hawk rips ; and, 
soaring over the tallest pine, the fierce hen-harrier 
screams and hisses ; cow, cow, cow, sounds the 
timorous cuckoo : thus our cheerful and pleasant 
birds do sing along else silent paths, strew^n with 
the bright and bluest violets, with houstonias, 
anemones, and cinque-foils. Academies of Music 
and Schools of Design, truly ! and to-day on all 
the young oaks shall be seen their bright crimson 
leaves, each in itself as good as a rich and delicate 
flower ; and the sky bends o'er us with its friendly 
face like Jerusalem delivered. 

And Mrs. Jones and Miss Brown — 

No, indeed : I declare it boldly let us leave out 



WALKS AND TALKS. 135 

man in such days ; his history may be written 
at nearly any future period, in dull weather. 

Yet hath the same toiling knave in yonder field 
a kind of grim advantage. 

The grime I perceive, and hear the toads sing. 

Yet the poet says, — 

"Not in their houses stand the stars. 
But o'er the pinnacles of thine." 

And also listen to m^ poet : — 

" Go thou to thy learned task, 
I stay with the flowers of Spring ; 

Do thou of the Ages ask, 
What to me the Hours will bring.'* 

Oh, the soft, mellow green of the swamp-sides ! 
Oh, the sweet, tender green of the pastures ! Do 
you observe how like the colors of currant-jelly 
are the maple-keys where the sun shines through 
them? I suppose to please you I ought to be 
mihappy^ but the contrast is too strong. 

See t\iQ Rana palustris bellying the world in the 
warm pool, and making up his froggy mind to 
accept the season for lack of a brighter ; and will 
not a gossipping dialogue between two comfortable 
brown thrashers cure the heartache of half the 
world ? Hear the charming song-sparrow, the 
Prima-donna of the wall side ; and the meadow- 
lark's sweet, timid, yet gushing lay hymns the 
praise of the Divine Beauty. 



136 THOREAU. 

And were jou ever in love ? 

Was that the squeak of a night-hawk ? 

Yes, flung beyond the thin wall of nature, 
whereon thy fowls and beasts are spasmodically 
plastered, and swamped so perfectly in one of thy 
own race as to forget this illusory showman's wax 
figures. 

A stake-driver ! pump-a-gaw, pump-a-gaAv, like 
an old wooden pump. They call the bittern butter- 
hump in some countries. Every thing is found in 
nature, even the stuff of which thou discour-sest 
thus learnedly. 

I would it were not, O Epaminondas Holly ! 

What, sii- ! and have you had a touch of the 
chicken-pox ? 

I shall not let the cat out of the bag^. 

Go in peace ! I must do my best and catch that 
green- throated gentleman. To take frogs hand- 
some requires a quick eye and a fine touch, like 
high art. They dive under the sludge ; their colors 
are of the water and the grass, chameleon-like. 
How ridiculous is yonder colt, the color of sugar 
gingerbread, set upon four long legs and swishing 
a bald tail ! and how he laughs at us men folks 
nibbling our crackers and herring ! May our 
wit be as dry as our mathiee. Now the water 
mouse-ear, typha, or reed-mace ; Brosera rotundi- 
foUa, Solomon's seal, violets of all sorts, bulbous 



WALKS AND TALKS. 137 

arethrum, yellow lily, dwarf cornel, lousewort, yel- 
low Star of Bethlehem, Polygala paucifolia^ Arum 
triphyllwm^ cohosh — 

Hush ! hush ! what names ! Hadst thou spoken 
to me of Violet, that cliild of beauty ! 

" Where its long rings unwinds the fern, 
The violet, nestling low, 
Casts back the white lid of its urn. 
Its purple streaks to show. 

Beautiful blossom ! first to rise 

And smile beneath Spring's wakening skies ; 

The courier of the band 
Of coming flowers, — what feelings sweet 
Flow, as tlie silvery germ we meet 

Upon its needle-wand ! " 

CONANTUM. 

As good as the domains of royalty, and is the 
possession of an ancient New England farmer. 

From this bridge I see only a simple field, with 
its few old apple-trees. It rises neatly to the 
west. 

When we traverse the whole of the long seign- 
iorage, I think you will agree that this is a good 
jjlace for a better than Montaigne-chateau (the 
stake-driver pump-a-gawing again). From this 
corner to Fairhaven bay the domain extends, with 
not an ounce of cultivated soil. First, a tract of 
woodland, with its pleasant wood-paths, its deep 



138 THOREAU. 

and mossy swamp, where owls ^ncl foxes have holes, 
and the long lichens sway their soft, green tresses 
from the rotting spruce. Behind yon old barn 
stands the original farmhouse ; the mouldering 
shell has ripened birth and death, marriage feasts 
and funeral tables, where now the careless flies 
only buzz and the century-old crow alights on the 
broad roof that almost touches the ground. The 
windows are gone, the door half rumed, the chim- 
ney down, the roof falling in, — sans eyes, sans 
ears, sans life, ,sans every thing. Not even a con- 
templative cat shakes his irresponsive sides on tliis 
solitude, and the solid grass grows up to the edges 
of the enormous door-stone. Our ancestors took a 
pride in acquiring the largest and flattest rock 
possible to lay before the hospitable sill. We do 
get unscrupulously rid of the ancestral mansion, 
and the j)ot of beans of the careful grandson bakes 
upon the architectural desolation of " my grand- 
papa." Ascend this height, and you will see (part 
second) the lovely valley of the Concord at your 
feet, — 

" See where the winding vale its lavish stores 
Irriguous spreads." 

There is the Musketaquid, the grass-ground river. 

A goodly view ! and noble walking ! 

Let us continue on a few steps more till we 
reach the little meadow, a natural arboretum, where 



WALKS AND TALKS. 139 

grows the black ash, the bass, and the cohosh, 
cornels, viburnums, sassafras, and arethusas : — 

" Each spot where tulips prank their state 
Has drunk the life-blood of the great ; 
The violets yon field which stain 
Are moles of cheeks which time hath slain." 

How the earliest kiss of June heaps the trees with 
leaves, and makes land and orchard, hillside and 
garden, verdantly attractive ! Man feels the blood 
of thousands in his body, and his heart pumps 
the sap of all this forest of vegetation through his 
proper arteries. Here is his work, and here he is 
a most willing workman. He displaces birch and 
chestnut, larch and alder, and will s^t out oak and 
beech to cover the land with leafy colonnades. 
Then it seems what a fugitive summer-flower, 
papilionaceous, is he, whisking about amid these 
longevities. Gladly he could spread himself abroad 
among them, love the tall trees as if he were their 
father, borrow by his love the manner of his trees, 
and with nature's patience watch the giants, from 
the youth to the age of the golden fruit or gnarled 
timber, nor think it long. This great domain, all 
but this one meadow, is under the holding of one 
old prudent husbandman ; and here is an old cellar- 
hole, where in front yet grows the vivacious lilac 
in profuse flower, — a plant to set. It has out- 
lived man and dog, hen and pig, house and wife, — 



140 TEOREAU. 

" all, all are gone," except the " old familiar face " 
of the delightsome lilac. And now we stand on 
the verge of broad Fairhaven, and below us falls 
the scaly frost-abraded precipice to the pitch-pines 
and walnuts that stand resigned to their lower 
avocations. There is about us here that breath of 
wildness, in whose patronage the good Indians 
dwelt ; there is around us in these herbaceous odors, 
in these lustral skies, all that earthly life hath ever 
known of beauty or of joy. Thus sings the lark 
as he springs from his nest in the grassy meadow ; 
thus in the barberry hedge, along the gray and pre- 
carious wall, the melodious song-sparrow chants in 
his brownish summer-suit and that brevet of honor 
on his breast, the black rosette, constituting him 
" Conantum's Malibran." It is Time's holiday, the 
festival of June, the leafy June, the flower-sped 
June, the bh-d-singing June, 

" And sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes." 

Let US get a good look from these cliffs at Baker 
Farm that lies on that opposite shore. There is 
Clematis Brook, Blue Heron Pond, and Mount 
Misery. 

WHITE POND. 

Yesterday was Spring : to-day beginneth the 
second lesson, what doth Summer typify? 



WALKS AND TALKS. 141 

Hot ovens, a baking-pan, the taking our turn at 
the spit. Grasshoppers creak over dry fields, and 
devil's-needles whizz across your hat as if they were 
scorched. Bhick snakes conclude it is pretty com- 
fortable, considering January. Oh ! the heat is 
like solid, beds of feathers. 

I think you said we were going to White Pond ? 

A favorable July afternoon's plunge ; the river 
flashes in the sun like a candle. This little forget- 
me-not of ours is as pure a blue as the German's. 
Ants, bees, millers, June flies, horse flies, open 
shop ; woodchucks set up at the mouths of their 
holes and our learned advocate, the Mephitis chinga^ 
probes the wood-roads for beetles; robins, bull- 
frogs, bobolinks, Maryland yellow- throats, and oven- 
birds perform operas all day long ; the brave 
senecio spots the sides of ditches with its dusky 
gold. How sweet its root smells ! 

This is a right pleasant stroll along the Assa- 
bet? 

First-class ! The caterpillars make minced-meat 
of the wild cherries. Nature does so love to pet 
worms, — an odd taste. The great iris is now 
perfect, and the maple-leaved viburnum, — two 
flower-belles ; the turtles dream at their ease, with 
but their noses above water among the floating- 
heart and potamogetons^ — a good investment in a 
blaze; verdure, verdure, — meadows, copses, fore- 



142 TEOREAU. 

grounds and distances. Showers raise np their 
heads in the west to catch the leafy prospect. 

Is it not against the dignity of man that a little 
light and heat can so despoil him ? 

See that nest of breams, the parents swimming 
over it, — some fun now in being tickled by a cool 
stream. And there lives a lordly baron, a great 
manorial seignior, with a private road to his castle 
of Belvoir, as good a king as can be found in 
Christendom. We had best stop at Duganne's 
spring and get a drink: it is as cold as charity. 
The swallows dart away over the river and Nut- 
meadow Brook, but a few feet above the surface, 
taking insects ; the turtles have writ their slow 
history on this Duganne sand-bank. There stretches 
the old Marlboro' road, and now, gleaming beneath 
the trees, you may see the water of White Pond. 

'Tis not as large as Walden : the water looks of 
the like purity. 

Yes, 'tis a pretty little Indian basin, lovely as 
Walden once was, and no pen could ever at all 
describe its beauties. We can almost see the 
sachem in his canoe in the shadowy cove. How 
wonderful, as we make the circuit of the shore, 
are the reflections ; but once we saw them in au- 
tumn, and then the marvellous effect of the col- 
ored woods held us almost to the going down of 
the sun. The water, slightly rippled, took their 



WALKS AND TALKS. 143 

proper character from the pines, birches, and few 
oaks which composed the grove, and the subma- 
rine wood seemed made of Lombardy poplar, with 
such delicious green, stained by gleams of mahog- 
any from the oaks, and streaks of white from the 
birches, every moment more excellent : it was the 
world through a prism. Is all the beauty to per- 
ish ? Shall no one remake this sun and wind, the 
sky-blue river, the river-blue sky, the waving 
meadow, the iron-gray house, just the color of the 
granite rock below, the paths of the thicket, the 
wide, straggling, wild orchard, in which Nature 
has deposited every possible flavor in the apples 
of different trees, — whole zones and climates she 
has concentrated into apples ? We think of the old 
benefactors who have conquered these fields ; of 
the old man, who is just dying in these days, who 
has absorbed such volumes of sunshine, like a huge 
melon or pumpkin in the sun, who has owned in 
every part of Concord a wood-lot, until he could 
not find the boundaries of them, and never saw 
their interiors. But, we say, where is he who is 
to save the present moment, and cause that this 
beauty be not lost? Shakespeare saw no better 
heaven or earth, but had the power and need to 
sing, and seized the dull, ugly England (ugly to 
this), and made it amiable and enviable to all 
reading men ; and now we are forced into likening 



144 THOSE AU. 

this to that, whilst if one of us had the chanting 
constitution that land would no more be heard of. 
But let us have space enough, let us have wild 
grapes and rock-maple with tubs of sugar ; let us 
have huge, straggling orchards ; let us have the 
^bha Huhhard pear, hemlock, savin, sjDruce, walnut 
and oak, cider-mills with tons of pummace, peat, 
cows, horses. Paddies, carts and sleds. But, with 
all this, not the usurpation of the past, the great 
hoaxes of the Homers and Shakespeares hindering 
the books and the men of to-day. What say you 
of Festus ? You people who have, been peda- 
gogues scarcely tolerate the good things in the 
moderns. I can repeat you a few classic lines of 
that poem as good as those of your old dramatists : 

" How can the beauty of material things 
So win the heart and work upon the mind, 
Unless like natured with theml 

When the soul sweeps the future like a glass, 
And coming things, full freighted with our fates, 
Jut out, dark, on the offing of the mind. 

The shadow hourly lengthens o'er my hrain. 
And peoples all its pictures with thyself. 

To the high air sunshine and cloud are one. 

And lasses with sly eyes, 
And the smile settling in their sun-flecked cheeks, 
Like noon upon the mellow apricot. 



WALKS AND TALKS. 145 

The wave is never weary of the wind. 

For marble is a shadow weighed with mind. 

The last high, upward slant of sun upon the trees, 
Like a dead soldier's sword upon his pall. 

Be every man a people in his mind." 

And that is a pretty little poem of Swedenborg's, 
written in prose : " The ship is in the harbor ; the 
sails are swelling ; the east wind blows ; let us 
weigh anchor, and put forth to sea." 

Oh, certainly! Oaks and horse-chestnuts are 
quite obsolete, and the Horticultural Society are 
about to recommend the introduction of the cab- 
bage as a shade-tree ; so much more comprehen- 
sible and convenient, all grown from the seed 
upward to its extreme generous crumple, \^ithin 
thirty days, — past contradiction the ornament of 
the modern world, and then good to eat, — choice 
good, as acorns and horse-chestnuts are not. We 
will have shade trees for breakfast. Then the 
effrontery of one man's exhibiting more wit or merit 
than another ! Man of genius, said you ? man of 
virtue ! I tell you both are malformations, dropsies 
of the brain or the liver, and must be strictly pun- 
ished in my new commonwealth. Nothing that is 
not extempore shall now be tolerated ; pyramids 
and cities shall give place to tents ; the man, soul, 



146 THOREAU. 

sack, and skeleton, which many years or ages haye 
built up, shall go for nothing ; his dinner, the rice 
and mutton he "ate two hours ago, now fast flowing 
into chyle, is all we consider. And the problem 
how to detach new dinner from old man, what 
we respect from what we repudiate, is the problem 
for the academies. 

" Oh, knit me, that am crumbled dust ! " 
And what saith Adsched of the melon, for that 
criticism needs a sop to Cerberus ? 

" Color, taste, and smell, — smaragdus, honej, and musk ; 
Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare ; 
If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair; 
If you have it whole, the full harvest moon is there." 

And which of us would not choose to be one of 
these insects, — rose-bugs of splendid fate, living 
on grape-flowers, apple-trees, and roses, and dying 
of an apoplexy of sweet sensations in the golden 
middle days of July ! Hail, vegetable gods ! I could 
not find it in my heart to chide the man who should 
ruin himself to buy a patch of well-timbered oak- 
land ; I admire the taste which makes the avenue 
to a house (were the house never so small) through 
a wood, as this disposes the mind of the host and 
guest to the deference due. We want deference ; 
and when we come to realize that thing mechani- 
cally, we want acres. Scatter this hot and crowded 
population at respectful distances each from each, 



WALKS AND TALKS. 147 

over tlie vacant world. The doctor and his friends 
fancied it was the cattle made all this wide space 
necessary ; and that if there were no cows to 
pasture, less land would suffice. But a cow does 
not require so much land as my eyes require be- 
twixt me and my neighbor. The poet asks : — 

" Where is Skymir, giant Skymir 1 
Come, transplant the woods for me ! 
Scoop up yonder aged ash, 
Centennial fir, old boundary pine, 
Beech by Indian warriors blazed, 
Maples tapped by Indian girls. 
Oaks that grew in the Dark Ages ; 
Heedful bring them, set them straight 
In sifted soil before my porch, 
Now turn the river on their roots, 
That no leaf wilt, or leading shoot 
Drop his tall-erected plume." 

Now just hop over with your eyes to yonder gar- 
den, which realizes Goldsmith's description, " The 
rusty beds, unconscious of a poke," — or is it Cow- 
per ; the rusty nail over the latch of the gate ; the 
peach-trees are rusty, the arbors rusty, and I 
think the proprietor, if there be one, is buried 
under that heap of old iron. But look across the 
fence into Captain Hardy's land : there's a musi- 
cian for you, who knows how to make men dance 
for him in all weathers, — all sorts of men. Paddies, 
felons, farmers, carpenters, painters, — yes! and 
trees and grapes, and ice and stone, hot days, cold 



148 THOREAU, 

days. Beat that true Orpheus lyre, if you can. 
He knows how to make men sow, dig, mow, and lay 
stone-wall, and make trees bear fruit God never 
gave them ; and foreign grapes yield the juices of 
France and Spain, on his south side. He saves 
every drop of sap, as if it were his blood. His 
trees are full of brandy. See his cows, his horses, 
his swine. And he, the piper that plays the jig 
which they all must dance, biped and quadruped 
and centipede, is the plainest, stupidest harlequin 
in a coat of no colors. His are the woods, the 
waters, hills, and meadows. With one blast of his 
pipe, he danced a thousand toos of gravel from yon- 
der blowing sand-heap to the bog-meadow, where 
the English grass is waving over thirty acres ; with 
another, he winded away sixty head of cattle in 
the spring, to the pastures of Peterboro', in the 
hiUs. 

And the other's ruins ask : — 

" Why lies this hair despised now, 
Which once thy care and art did show ? 
Who then did dress the much-loved toy, 
In spii'es, globes, angry curls and coy, 
Which with skill'd negligence seemed shed 
About thy curious, wild young head ? 
Why is this rich, this pis tic nard 
Spilt, and the box quite broke and marred ? " 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 14© 



CHAPTER IX. 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTIKUED. 



" Felix ille animi, divisque simillimus ipsis, 
Quem non mordaci resplendens gloria fuoo 
Solicitat, non faatosi mala gaudia luxus, 
Sed tacitos sinit ire dies, et paiipere cultu 
Exigit innocuae silentia vitse" — Politian. 

" If over this world of ours 
His wings my plioenix spread, 
How gracious o'er land and sea 
The soul-refreshing shade 1 

** Either world inhabits he, 
Sees oft below him planets roll; 
His body is all of air compact. 
Of Allah's love his soul. 

"Courage, Hafiz, though not thine 
Gold wedges and silver ore, 
More worth to thee thy gift of song. 
And thy clear insight more." — Hafiz. 

" The wretched pedlear more noise he maketh to cry his soap than a rich 
merchant all his dear worth wares." — Anchen RiwLiE. 



flint's pond. 

OUPPOSE we go to Flint's. 
Agreed. 
That country with its high summits in Lincoln 
is good for breezy days. I love the mountain view 
from the Three Friends' Hill beyond the pond, 
looking over Concord. It is worth the while to 



150 THOBEAU. 

see the mountains in our horizon once a day. They 
are the natural temples, the elevated brows of 
the earth, looking at which the thoughts of the 
beholder are naturally elevated and sublime, — 
etherealized. I go to Flint's Pond, also, to see a 
rippling lake and a reedy island in its midst, 
Reed Island. A man should feed his senses with 
the best the land affords. These changes in the 
weather, — how much they surprise us who keep no 
journal ! but look back for a year, and you will 
most commonly find a similar change at the same 
time, like the dry capsules of the violets along the 
wood-road. TemjDeratures, climates, and even 
clouds, may be counted, like flowers, insects, ani- 
mals, and reptiles, among the Constants, — inevi- 
table reappearances ; and things yet further typify 
each other, like the breeze rushing over the water- 
fall. 

Nay, do not pierce me with your regularity, 
though you might say, like Peter to the senti- 
mental lady, " Madam, my pigs never squeal." 

Not so : learn to see its philosophy in each thing. 
It is a significant fact, that though no man is quite 
well or healthy, yet every one believes, practically, 
that health is the rule, and disease the exception ; 
and each invalid is wont to think himself in a 
minority, and to postpone somewhat of endeavor 
to another state of existence. But it may be some 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 151 

encouragement to men to know that in this re- 
spect they stand on the same platform, that disease 
is in fact the rule of our terrestrial life, and the 
prophecy of a celestial life. Where is the coward 
who despairs because he is sick? Seen in this 
light, our life with all its diseases will look healthy ; 
and, in one sense, the more healthy as it is the 
more diseased. 

Upon 3^our principle " I am thus wet because I 
am thus dry." 

Disease is not an accident of the individual, nor 
even of the generation, but of life itself. In some 
form, and to some degree or other, it is one of the 
permanent conditions of life. It is a cheering fact, 
nevertheless, that men affirm health unanimously, 
and esteem themselves miserable failures. Here 
was no blunder. They gave us life on exactly 
these conditions, and me thinks we shall live it 
with more heart when we clearly perceive that 
these are the terms on which we have it. Life is 
a warfare, a struggle, and the diseases of the body 
answer to the troubles and defects of the spirit. 
Man begins by quarrelling with the animal in him, 
and the result is immediate disease. In proportion 
as the spirit is more ambitious and persevering, the 
more obstacles it will meet with. It is as a seer 
that man asserts his disease to be exceptional. 

Your philosophers and their tax of explanations 
remind me of the famihar Snail : — 



152 TEOREAU. 

" Wise emblem of our politic world, 
Sage snail, within thine own self curled ; 
Instruct me swiftly to make haste, 
Whilst thou my feet go slowly past. 
Compendious snail! thou seem'st to me 
Large Euclid's strict epitome. 
That big still with thyself dost go, 
And livest an aged embryo." 

And I might make tli^lt other criticism upon 
society and its institutions : — 

" While man doth ransack man 
And builds on blood, and rises by distress ; 
And th' Inlieritance of desolation leaves 
To great-expecting hopes." 

Then mark how man and his affairs fall in rounds : 
the railroad keeps time like one of Simon Willard's 
clocks, saturated with insurance. How much the 
life of certain men goes to sustain, to make re- 
spected, the institutions of society ! They are the 
ones who pay the heaviest tax. They are, in effect, 
supported by a fund which society possesses for 
that end, or they receive a pension ; and their life 
seems to be a sinecure, but it is not. Unwritten 
laws are the most stringent. He who is twice 
erratic has become the object of custom : — 

" There are whom Heaven has blessed with store of wit. 
You want as much again to manage it." 

Then am I a customer, and a paying one. Mon- 
taigne took much pains to be made a citizen of 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 153 

Kome : I slioiilcl much prefer to have the freedom 
of a peach-orchard, — once a great part of this town 
of Lincoln was such, — or of some plantations of 
apples and pears I have seen, to that of any city. 
You do not understand values, said Sylvan. I 
economize every drop of sap in my trees, as if 
it were wine. A few years ago these trees were 
whipsticks : now every one of them is worth a 
hundi-ed dollars. Look at their form : not a branch 
nor a twig is to spare. They look as if they were 
arms and hands and fingers, holding out to you 
the fruit of the Hesperides. Come, see, said he, 
what weeds grow behind this fence. And he 
brought me to a pear-tree. Look, he said : this 
tree has every property that should belong to 
a plant. It is hardy and almost immortal. It 
accepts every species of nourishment, and can live 
almost on none, like a date. It is free from every 
form of blight. Grubs, worms, flies, bugs, all 
attack it. It yields them all a share of its gener- 
ous juices ; but, when they left their eggs on its 
broad leaves, it thickened its cuticle a little, and 
suffered them to dry up and shook off the vermin. 
It grows like the ash Ygdrasil. 

A bushel of wood-ashes were better than a cart- 
load of mythology. If I did not love Carlyle for 
his worship of heroes, I should not forgive him for 
setting out that ash. There is the edge of the 
7* 



154 THOBEAU. 

Forest Late, like an Indian tradition, gleaming 
across the pale-face's moonshine. From this Three 
Friends' Hill (when shall we three meet again?) 
the distant forests have a curiously rounded or bow- 
ery look, clothing the hills quite down to the water's 
edge and leaving no shore ; the ponds are like 
drops of dew, amid and partly covering the leaves. 
So the great globe is luxuriously crowded without 
margin. The groundsel, or " fire-weed," which 
has been touched by frost, already is as if it had 
died long months ago, or a fire had run through it. 
The black birches, now yellow on the hill-sides, 
look like flames ; the chestnut-trees are burnished 
yellow as well as green. It is a beautifully clear 
and bracing air, with just enough coolness, full 
of the memory of frosty mornings, through which 
all things are distinctly seen, and the fields look 
as smooth as velvet. The fragrance of grapes is 
on the breeze, and the red drooping barberries 
sparkle amid their leaves. The horned (jsornutd) 
utricularia on the sandy pond shores is not affected 
by the frost. The sumacs are among the reddest 
leaves ; the witch-hazel is in bloom, and the crows 
fiU the landscape with a savage sound. The mul- 
lein, so conspicuous with its architectural spire, 
the prototype of candelabrums, must be remem- 
bered. We might relish in autumn a Berkshire 
brook, which falls, and now beside the road, and 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTLNUED. 155 

now under it, cheers the traveller for miles with its 
loud voice. If Plerrick be the best of English poets, 
as sometimes, when in the vein, you say (a true 
Greek), this landscape could give him all he needed, 
— he who sang a cherry, Julia's hair (we have 
plenty of that), Netterby's pimple (yes), his own 
hen Partlet, and Ben Jonson (we have all of 
these, excepting a large assortment of Ben Jon- 
sons). We possess a wider variety here among 
the maples ; but the poetry and the prose of that 
age was more solid and cordial. 

There is a versifier of ours who has made some 
accurate notices of our native things, — Street. 
I fear you must let me give you a proof of this, 
nothing of a Herrick. Mate me if you will these 
passages. He is a good colorist. 

" Yon piny knoll, thick-covered with the brown. 
Dead fringes, in the sunshine's bathing flood 
Looks like dark gold. 

The thicket by the road-side casts its cool 
Black breadth of shade across the heated dust. 

The thistle-downs, through the rich, 
Bright blue, quick float, like gliding stars, and then 
Touching the sunshine flash and seem to melt 
Within the dazzling brilliance. 

Another sunset, crouching low 

Upon a rising pile of cloud, 
Bathes deep the ishind with its glow, 

Then shrinks behind its gloomy shroud. 



156 THOREAU. 

... the little violet 
Pencilled with purple on one snowy leaf. 

And golden-rod and aster stain the scene 
With hues of sun and sky. 

The last butterfly 
Like a winged violet, floating in the meek 
Pink-colored sunshine, sinks his velvet feet 
Within the pillared mullein's deUcate down. 

Here showers the light in golden dots, 
There sleeps the shade in ebon spots. 

Floated the yellow butterfly, 

A wandering spot of sunshine by. 

. . . the buckwheat's scented snow.'* 

Not less acute and retentive his ear : — 

. . . ''that flying harp, the honey-bee. 

. . . the spider's clock 
Ticked in some crevice of the rock. 

The light cHck of the milkweed's bursting pods. 

. . . the spider lurks 
A close-crouched ball ; out-darting as a hum 
Dooms its trapped prey, and looping quick its threads 
Chains into helplessness those buzzing wings. 
The wood-tick taps its tiny muffled drum 
To the shriU cricket-fife." 

He saw peculiarities no one else describes, — exqui- 
site touches of creation for his insight. 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 157 

" The whizzing of yon humming-bird's swift wings, 
Spanning gray, glimmering circles round its shape. 

Yon aster, that displayed 
A brief while since its lustrous bloom, has now 
Around the shells tliat multiply its life 
Woven soft downy plumes. 

The gossamer, motionless, hung from the spray, 
Where the weight of the dew-drops had torn it away, 
And the seed of the thistle, that whisper could swing 
Aloft on its wheel, as though borne on a wing, 
When the yellow-bird severed it, dipping across, 
Its soft plumes unruffled fell down on the moss. 

Lives in the ripple edging flowery shapes 
With melting lacework. 

. . . from the earth the fern 
Thrusts its green, close-curled wheel, the downy sprout 
Its twin-leaves. 

Beside yon mullein's braided stalk. 

. . . the snail 
Creeps in its twisted fortress. 

. . . the twisting cattle-path." 
He has liis prettinesses : — 

..." the holy moon, 
A sentinel upon the steeps of heaven. 

A cluster of low roofs is prest 
Against the mountain's leaning breast. 



158 THOREAU. 

One mighty pine, amid the straggling trees. 
Lifts its unchanging pyramid to heaven. 

He marked the rapid whirlwind shoot, 
Trampling the pine-tree with its foot. 

The bee's low hum, the whirr of wings, 
And the sweet songs of grass-hid things." 

So Ya-ughan has a hint of this insight : — 

" As this loud brook's incessant fall 
In streaming rings re-stagnates all. 
Which reach by course the bank, and then 
Are no more seen. 

Shall my short hour, my inch. 
My one poor sand. 

Her art, whose pensive weeping eyes 
Were once sin's loose and tempting spies. 

Heaven 
Is a plain watch, and without figures winds 
All ages up. 

How shrill are silent tears ! " 

But Vaughan is hke the interiors of Fra An- 
gelic o. 

Has this pond an outlet, as methinks it should, 
when you hold the reflections caught from its 
waters thus precious ? 

It has : a brook runs from the southerly end, 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 159 

that joins another from Beaver Pond, and chasing 
swiftly down fine meadows, amid rocky knolls in 
Weston, goes to turn w^ater-wdieels at Stony Brook. 
Man fits into Nature like a seal in its ring. But 
enf oncer ^ or how is it in French ? Clap down in 
the middle of to-day's pudding, and eat thereof, — 
they whip lads at school for looking off their 
books ; despatch your Sunday plate of broth. 
The parson carries the sins of the yillage by virtue 
of his cloth, upon his back. 

KOUND HILL IN SUDBURY MEADOWS. 

You judge it is three miles and one-half to the 
point where you propose to take the boat ? 

Yes : in the rear of the blacksmith's house, — he 
who calls the bittern " Baked Plum-pudding and 
Cow-poke," and the woodchuck '' Squash-belly." 
A composed, moderate, self-understanding man ; 
— here's the pinnace (as our neighbor names his 
candle-stick) for a voyage among the lilies. Why 
look ye so intently at the bottom ? 

I commonly sit, not m, but above, the water. 

Be assured, sir, your feet are not w^holly in the 
Concord. 'Tis dr}^ enough in July, outside, — push 
off ; she will not sink more than four feet, — the 
depth here. Full many a glorious morning have 
I seen, but not a more superb one than this. How 
in its glassy folds the dark, wine-colored river lays 



160 THOREAU. 

its unswept carpet across the fragrant meadows. 
The button-bushes and willows resound with the 
gleeful chorus of redwings and bobolinks, while 
the courageous king-bird hovers quivering over his 
nest. If there is any one thing birds do like, it is 
to sing in sunshiny mornings. Why, this is the 
mouth of the Pantry Brook : it comes out of the 
mysterious interstices of Sudbury, where the mud 
is up to your middle, and where some of Sam 
Haynes's folks died. I wish I had a photograph 
of Sam, the fisherman, as the man did when he was 
told that Croesus was the richest man who ever 
lived : if he beat Sam's stories, he must have been 
rich. And there is Bound Hill, the river bending, 
yet not before we anchor in t^he Port of Lilies, per- 
fumed love-tokens floating in a lapsing dream of 
turquoise and gold, like Cleopatra's barge ; some 
experiments in rose-tints, too, were tried with that 
dear creature, the water-lily, and did well. 

When you thus eulogize Nature, it reminds me 
how great an advantage he possesses who can 
turn a verse over all the human race. I read in 
Wood's Athense Oxonienses a score of pages of 
learned nobodies, of whose once odoriferous repu- 
tations not a trace remains in the air ; and then I 
come to the name of some Carew or Herrick, Suck- 
ling or Chapman, as fresh and lustrous as these 
floating sunlight creams. As a poet says : — 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 161 

" Tliere are beggars in Iran and Araby, 
Said was hungrier than all ; 
Men said he was a fly 
That came to every festival, 
Also he came to the mosque 
In trail of camel and caravan, 
Out from Mecca to Isphahan ; — 
Northward he went to the snowy hills, — 
At court he sat in the grave divan. 
His music was the south v/ind's sigh, 
His lamp the maiden's downcast eye, 
And ever the spell of beauty came 
And turned the drowsy world to flame. 
By lake and stream and gleaming hall. 
And modest copse, and the forest tall. 
Where'er he went the magic guide 
Kept its place by the poet's side. 
Tell me the world is a talisman. 
To read it must be the art of man ; 
Said melted the days in cups' like pearl, 
Served high and low, the lord and the churl; 
Loved harebells nodding on a rock, 
A cabin hung with curling smoke. 
And huts and tents, nor loved he less 
Stately lords in palaces, 
Fenced by form and ceremony." 



There, on Round Hill, is a true woodman's 
hut. The hill is low, but from its position enjoys 
a beautiful outlook upon Sudbury meadows. Yes : 
this is a good place to fish. Can you keep worms 
in your mouth, like Indians? Maybe they won't 
bite. 

Which, — fish, worms, or Indians ? Things that 
are done it is needless to speak about, or remon- 



162 THOREAU. 

strate against : things that are past are needless to 
blame. 

PETER OE BOSE. 

I fancied the saying, that man was created a lit- 
tle lower than the angels, should have been, a little 
lower than the anhnals ! 

Does it not flavor of puerile conceit, that fancy ? 

The conceit of man is dark; but, as we go to 
Goose-shore swimming-j)lace, on the Assabet, with 
Peter running before, I feel sorry that Goethe 
introduced a black dog in Faust, as the kernel of 
the elephant. And the wild animals are supe- 
rior to the tame, as the Indian treads before the 
civilized man. Observe Peter capering through 
bush and briar, plunging into pool or stream, with 
his smiling tail, and he sweats through his nose, 
au revoir ! What dull pedants the mkth-provok- 
ing creatures consider us ! and how more than 
tame poor Cowper's three tame hares may have 
deemed him, in his nightcap, made by Mrs. Un- 
win ! Peter catches no cold, though he wets his 
feet, and never has the doctor. As the Indians 
amused the Jesuits in Canada, by sitting all day in 
a nucle manner, frozen to the ice, and fishing com- 
placently through holes in it, as if lolling on feather 
beds, so I have known Peter take a nap all night 
on a snow-bank in January. 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 163 

There, he 's at the base of that mud-hole ; Lyell 
was never deeper in geology than he is. 

I saw a man, a few days since, working by the 
river with a horse carting dirt, and the horse and 
his relations to him struck me as very remarkable. 
There was the horse, a mere animated machine, 
though his tail was brushing off the flies, his whole 
condition subordinated to man's, with no tradition 
(perhaps no instinct) in him of a time when he 
was wild and free, — completely humanized. No 
contract had been made with him that he should 
have the Saturday afternoons, or the Sundays, or 
any holidays, his independence never being recog- 
nized ; it being now quite forgotten, both by man 
and horse, that the horse was ever free. For I am 
not aware that there are any wild horses, known 
surely not to be descended from tame ones. He 
was assisting that man to pull down that bank and 
spread it over the meadow, only keeping off the 
flies with his tail, and stamping and catching a 
mouthful of grass or leaves from time to time, on 
his own account ; all the rest for man. It seemed 
hardly worth while that ho should be animated for 
this. It was plain that the man was not educating 
the horse, not trying to develop his nature, but 
merely getting work out of him, — 

" Extremes are counted worst of all." 



164 THOREA U. 

That mass of animated matter seemed more com- 
pletely the servant of man than any inanimate. 
For slaves have their holidays ; a heaven is con- 
ceded to them (such as it is) ; but to the horse, 
none. Now and forever he is man's slave. The 
more I considered, the more the man seemed akin 
to the horse, only his was the stronger will of the 
two ; for a little further on I saw an Irishman shov- 
elling, who evidently was as much tamed as the 
horse. He had stipulated that to a certain extent 
his independence should be recognized ; and yet he 
was really but a little more independent. What is 
a horse but an animal that has lost its liberty ; and 
has man got any more liberty for having robbed 
the horse, or has he lost just as much of his own, 
and become more like the horse he has robbed? 
Is not the other end of the bridle, too, coiled 
around his own neck ? hence stable-boys, jockeys, 
and all that class that are daily transported by fast 
horses. There he stood, with his oblong, square 
figure (his tail mostly sawed off), seen against the 
water, brushing off the flies with the stump, braced 
back, while the man was filling the cart. 

" The ill that 's wisely feared is half withstood, — 
He will redeem our deadly, drooping state." 

I regard the horse as a human being in a hum- 
ble state of existence. Virtue is not left to stand 
alone. He who practises it will have neighbors. 



WALKS AND TALKS CONTINUED. 165 

Man conceitedly names the intelligence and in- 
dustry of animals instinct, and overlooks their wis- 
dom and fitness of behavior. I saw where the 
squirrels had carried off the ears of corn more 
than twenty rods from the corn-field, to the woods. 
A little further on, beyond Hubbard's Brook, I saw 
a gray squirrel with an ear of yellow corn, a foot 
long, sitting on the fence, fifteen rods from the 
field. He dropped the corn, but continued to sit 
on the rail where I could hardly see him, it being 
of the same color with himself, which I have no 
doubt he was well aware of. He next went to a 
red maple, where his policy was to conceal him- 
self behind the stem, hanging perfectly still there 
till I passed, his fur being exactly the color of 
the bark. When I struck the tree, and tried to 
frighten him, he knew better than to run to the 
next tree, there being no continuous row b}^ which 
he might escape ; but he merely fled higher up, and 
put so many leaves between us that it was difficult 
to discover him. When I threw up a stick to 
frighten him, he disappeared entirely, though I 
kept the best watch I could, and stood close to the 
foot of the tree. 

They are wonderfully cunning ! 

That is all you can say for the7n. There is some- 
thing pathetic to think of in such a life as an aver- 
age Norfolk man may be supposed to live, drawn 



166 TEOREAU. 

out to eiglity years ; and lie has died, perchance, 
and there is nothing but the mark of his cider-mill 
left. Here was the cider-mill, and there the or- 
chard, and there the hog-pasture, and so men lived 
and ate, and drank, and passed away like vermin. 
Their long life was mere duration. As respectable 
is the life of the wood-chuck, which perpetuates 
its race in the orchard still. That is the life of 
these select men spun out. They will be forgotten 
in a few years, even by such as themselves, as ver- 
min. They will be known like Tucker, who is 
said to have been a large man, who weighed 250, 
who had five or six heavy daughters who rode to 
Suffolk meeting-house on horseback, taking turns ; 
they were so heavy, that one could only ride 
at once. What, then, would redeem such a life ? 
We only know that they ate and drank, and built 
barns and died, and were buried, and still, per- 
chance, their tombstones cumber the ground, — 
" time's dead low water." There never has been 
a girl who learned to bring up a child, that she 
might afterwards marry. 

Perhaps jou depreciate humanit}^, and overes- 
timate somewhat else. A whimsical person said 
once, he should make a prayer to the chance that 
brought him into the world. He fancied that 
when the child had escaped out of the womb, he 
cried, " I thank the bridge that brought me safe 



WALES AND TALKS CONTINUED. 167 

over: I would not for ten worlds take the next 
one's chance ! " Will the}^, one of these days, at 
Fourierville, make boys and girls to order and 
pattern ? I want, Mr. Christmas-office, a boy be- 
tween No. 17 and No. 134, half-and-half of both, 
or you might add a trace of 113. I want a pair of 
little girls like 91, only a tinge more of the Swede, 
and a tinge of the Moorish. And then men are 
so careless about their really good side. James 
Baker does not imagine that he is a rich man, yet 
he keeps from year to year that lordly park of his, 
by Fairhaven Pond, lying idly open to all comers, 
without crop or rent, like another Lord Breadalbane, 
with its hedges of Arcady, its sumptuous lawns 
and slopes, its orchard and grape-vines, the mirror 
at its foot, and the terraces of Holloway on the 
opposite bank. Yet I know he would reprove me, 
as the poet has written : — 

" Said Saadi, — Wher; I stood before 
Hassan the camel-driver's door, 
I scorned the fame of Timour brave, — 
Timour to Hassan was a slave. 
In every glance of Hassan's eye 
I read rich years of victory. 
And I, who cower mean and small 
In the frequent interval, 
When wisdom not with me resides, 
Worsliip toil's wisdom that abides ! 
I slmnned his eyes, — the faithful man's, 
I shunned tlie toiling Hassan's glance." 

Work, yes ; and good conduct additional. You 



168 THOREAU. 

have been, so I have read, a schoolmaster. I trust 
you advised your neophytes to keep company with 
non€ but men of learning and reputation ; to be- 
have themselves upon the place with candor, cau- 
tion, and temperance ; to avoid compotations ; to 
go to bed in good time, and rise in good time ; to 
let them see you are men that observe hours and 
discipline ; to make much of yourself, and want 
nothing that is fit for jou. The life of Ccesar him- 
self has no greater example for us than our own. 
We must thrust against a door to know whether 
it is bolted against us or not. Where there is no 
difBculty, there is no praise ; and every human ex- 
cellence must be the product of good fortune, im- 
proved by hard work and genius. 



THE LATTER YEAR. 169 



CHAPTER X. 



THE LATTER YEAR. 



"Come, sleep! Oh, sleep! the certain knot of 
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe. 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 
The indifferent j adge between the high and low." 

SiDXET. 

"You meaner beauties of the night 
That poorly satisfy our eyes, 
More by your number than your light; 
You common people of the skies, t 

What are you when the moon shall rise? " 

H. WOTTON. 

. . . "in the dust be equal made 
With the poor crooked scythe and spade." 

Shiblet. 

"Astrochiton Heracles, King of tire. Chorus-leader of the world. Sun, 
Shepherd of mortal life, who castest long shadows, riding spirally the 
whole heaven with burning disk, rolling the twelve-monthed year, the 
Bon of Time, thou performest orbit after orbit." — Xonxus. 

" It is not but the tempest that doth show 
The seaman's cunning, but the field that tries 
The captain's courage." — Ben Joj^son. 

T~^0 you observe how long the cultivated trees 
hold their leaves, such as apples, cherries, 
and peaches ? As if they said, " We can longer 
maintain our privileges than yonder uncultured 
generation." The black willows stand bare along 
the edges of the river ; the balm-of-Gileads and a 



170 TEOREAU. 

few triumphant elms yet hang out their dusky 
banners on the outward walls of the latter year. 
That Indian summer, too, made its tranquil appear- 
ance, — put in leg-bail for the greasy old redskins. 
After the verdure goes, after the harvest of the 
year is gathered in, there is a stationary period, — 
the year travels on a paved road. It is with leaves 
as with fruits and woods and animals : when they 
are mature, their different characters appear. That 
migration of the birds is a cunning get-off. The 
most peaceful, the sunniest autumn day in New 
England has a blue background, like some culti- 
vated person at the bottom of whose palaver is 
ice. I hear the barking of a red squirrel whose 
clock is set a-going by a little cause in cool 
weather, when the spring is tense, and a great 
scolding and ado among the jays. The house- 
wives of Nature wish to see the rooms properly 
cleaned and swept, before the upholsterer comes and 
nails down his carpet of snow. The swamp burns 
along its margin with the scarlet berries of the 
black alder, or prinos ; the leaves of the pitcher- 
plant (which old Josselyn called Hollow-leaved Lav- 
ender) abound, and are of many colors, from plain 
green to a rich striped yellow, or deep red. 

" The hickory-shell, cracked open by its fall, 
Shows its ripe fruit, an ivory ball, within ; 
And the white chestnut-burr displays its sheath 
White glistening with its glossy nuts below. 



THE LATTER YEAR. 171 

Scattered around, the wild rose-bushes hang, 
Their ruby buds tipping their thorny sprays ; 
The everlasting's blossoms seem as cut 
In delicate silver, whitening o'er the slopes ; 
The seedy clematis, branched high, is robed 
With woolly tufts ; the snowy Indian-pipe 
Is streaked with black decay ; the wintergreen 
Oflfers its berries ; and the prince's-pine. 
Scarce seen above the fallen leaves, peers out, 
A firm, green, glossy wreath." 

Now you allude to it, does not a deception like 
that of the climate pervade the men ? The down- 
right cheer of old England struggling through its 
brogue, the dazzhng stiletto affliction of Italy and 
France, with us are lacking. Like our climate, 
and our scale of classes, the sentiment of New 
England is changeable. It is one of the year's 
expiring days, one of his death-bed daj^s. The 
children, playing at the school-house a mile off, the 
rattle of distant carts, farmers' voices calling to 
their cattle, cocks crowing in unknown barn-yards, 
every sound speeds through the attenuated air, as 
the beat of the death-tick echoes in the funeral- 
chamber ! The trees are as bare as my purse. 
How significant is the effect of these blue smokes, 
as if they came from some olfactory altar of the 
Parsees, imploring the protection of yon threadbare 
luminary ! Methinks is something divine in the 
culinary art, — the silent columns of light-blue 
vapor rising slowly. Beneath them many a rusty 
kettle sings : — 



172 TEOREAU. 

" To intersoar unseen delights the more." 

I cannot doubt but the range of the thermometer 
invades the morals of the people. The puritan 
element survives in our cultivated conservatism, if 
there is gilding on the chain. Certain families re- 
solve to divide themselves from the mass by ingen- 
ious marriages. And talent tries to keep its head 
above low- water, yet the agreeable orators, who 
go to Plymouth and delectate the mass, if you 
come at them in parlors, are simple creatures, and 
our great historian took the weight of his waistcoat 
before he went forth. _ 

'Tis well he was not forced to conceal the rav- 
elled sleeve of care by buttoning up his outer 
garment. A few years past, yonder breezy repre- 
sentative may have been an usher in a school. 

Where, doubtless, filligree was taught. 

FROSTY WEATHEE. 

Winter is fairly broached. When the year be- 
comes cold, then we know how the pine and 
cypress are the last to lose their leaves. 

I should say he is in such a condition that tap- 
ping is impossible : — 

" The moon has set, the Pleiades are gone ; 
'Tis the raid-noon of night; the hour isbj, 
And yet I watch alone." 

How hollow echoes the frozen road, under the 



THE LATTER YEAR. 173 

wheels of the teamster's wagon ! The muzzles of 
the patient steers are fringed in ice, and their 
backs whitened with hoar-frost. For all the sing- 
ing-birds, the chickadees remain ; the sawing and 
scraping of the jay and the crows do remotely 
pertain to music. A single night snaps the year 
in two. In the declaration of Tang, it is said, O 
Sim, when wilt thou expire ? We will die with 
thee. 

" Sweet mother ! I can weave the web no more, 
So much I love the youth, so much I lingering love." 

Shadows hang like flocks of ink from the pitch- 
pines ; the winter sunset, the winter twilight, falls 
slowty down and congeals the helpless valleys ; the 
sky has a base of lustrous apple-green, and then 
flows softly up to the zenith that tender roseate 
flush, like a virgin's cheek when she is refusing 
the youth. Is winter a cheat? "Neighbor," as 
Margaret says when she finds Faust is, " lend me 
your smelling-bottle." 

The weather forms its constitution in our peo- 
ple, and they are equal to it. As we catch a mor- 
sel of warmth behind the sunny rock, ITl sing 
you a song about old King Cole : — 

teamsters' soxg. 

How the wind whistled ! the snow, how it flew I 
The teamsters knew not if it were still or no, 



174 TEOREAU, 

And the trains stood puffing, all kept away back, 
And the drifts lay deep o'er the railroad track ; 
While the snow it flew, and the wind it blew, 
And the teamsters bawled, — what a jolly crew I 

Their caps are all dressed with the muskrat fur, 
But the colder the weather (the truth I aver), 
Still less do they turn to the soft, silky lining ; 
Their ears are of stone, — 'tis easy divining, — 
And their hearts full of joy, while the snow whirls fast. 
And the lash of the North swings abroad on the blast. 

And the sky is steel on the white cloud flecked, 
And the pines are ghosts in their snow-wreaths decked, 
And the stormy surge of the gale is rising 
While the teamster enjoys the tempest surprising, 
With his lugging-sled and his oxen four ; 
When the wind roars the hardest, he bawls all 
the more. 

Did you never admire the steady, silent, windless 
fall of the snow in some lead-colored day, silent 
save the little ticking of the flakes as they touch 
the twigs ? It is chased silver, moulded over the 
pines and oak-leaves. Soft shades hang like cur- 
tains along the closely draped wood-paths. Frozen 
apples become little cider-vats. The old, crooked 
apple-trees, frozen stiff in the pale shivering sun- 
light that appears to be dying of consumption, 
gleam forth like the heroes of one of Dante's cold 



THE LATTER YEAR, 175 

hel^s ; we would not mind a change in the mercury 
of the dream. The snow crunches under the foot, 
the chopper's axe rings funereally through the 
tragic air. At early morn the frost on button- 
bushes and willows was silvery, and every stem 
and minutest twig and filamentary weed became 
a silver thing, while the cottage-smokes came up 
salmon-colored into that oblique day. At the base 
of ditches were shooting crystals, like the blades 
of an ivory-handled pen-knife, and rosettes and 
favors fretted of silver on the flat ice. The Httle 
cascades on the brook were ornamented with trans- 
parent shields, and long candelabrums, and sperma- 
ceti-colored fools' caps, and plaited jellies, and white 
globes, with the black water whirling along trans- 
parently underneath. The sun comes out, and 
all at a glance rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and 
emeralds start into intense life on the angles of the 
snow-crystals. 

You remember that Dryden says, common-sense 
is a rule in every thing but matters of faith and 
revelation. 

Because he lived in Will's coffee-house. He 
would have had an ideal sense, had he experienced 
a New England winter. Frost is your safest shoe- 
leather in the marshes. How red the androm- 
eda-leaves have turned ! Snow and ice remind us 
of architecture. No lathe ever made such hand- 
some scrolls and friezes. 



176 THOBEAU. 

And to the arctic man these cold matters make 
paradise. As Kudlago, the Eskimo, who was 
going home aboard ship from warmer climes, cried, 
in his d}dng moment, " Teiko-se Ko^ teiko-se Ko?^^ 
— Do you see ice, do you see ice ? 

By fall and fount, by gleaming hill, 
And sheltered farm-house still and gray, 

By broad, wild marsh and wood-set rill, 
Dies cold and sere the winter's day. 
Oh, icy sunlight, fade away ! 

Thou pale magnificence of fate ! 
Thy arch is but the loitering cloud, 

A tall pine-wood thy palace-gate. 
The alder-buds thy painted crowd. 
Some far-off road thy future proud, 
Much cold security allowed. 

Art and architecture, I suppose, you consider 
the same thing. If I visited galleries where pict- 
ures are preserved, I would go now, though Haw- 
thorne says he would as soon see a basilisk as one 
of the old pictures at the Boston Athenaeum. I 
think the fine art of Goethe and company very 
dubious ; and it is doubtful whether all this talk 
about prints of the old Italian school means any 
thing (Giotto and the rest). It may do very well 
for idle gentlemen. 



THE LATTER YEAR. 177 

I reply, there is a fire to every smoke. There 
were a few Anakim who gave the thing vogue by 
their realism. If Odin wrought in iron or in ships, 
these worked as rancorously in paint. Michel 
Angelo, Ribiera (the man that made the skull and 
the monk, who is another skull looking at it), and 
the man who made in marble the old Torso Her- 
cules ; the Phidias, man or men, who made the 
Parthenon friezes, had a drastic style, which a 
blacksmith or a stone-mason would say was starker 
than their own. And I adhere to Van Waao^en's 
belief, that there is a pleasure from works of art 
which nothing else can yield. Yes, we should 
have a water-color exhibition -in Boston; but I 
should like better to have water-color tried in the 
art of writing. Let our troubadours have one of 
these Spanish slopes of the dry ponds or basins 
which run from Walden to the river at Fairhaven, 
in their September dress of color, under a glower- 
ing sky, — the Walden sierras given as a theme, — 
and they required to daguerreotj^pe that in good 
words : — 

" I long to talk with some old lover's gliost 
Who died before the god of love was born." 

I will do my best ; but, as we were speaking of 

architecture, remember that this art consists in 

the imitation of natural Principles, and not like 

the other arts in the imitation of natural Forms. I 

8* L 



178 THOREAU. 

never "know the reason why our people have not 
reached some appropriate style of architecture. In 
Italy and Switzerland and England, the picturesque 
seems to spring forth from the soil, in the shapes 
of buildings, as well seasoned as its trees and flow- 
ers themselves. But look at the clapboard farm- 
house we are passing ! Is there not a needless 
degree of stiffness and too little ornamentation ? 

Moderate your criticism, my dear Gilpin : utility 
lies at the bottom of our village architecture ; the 
structure springs out of that. This simple edifice, 
created out of white pine-boards and painted white ; 
this case of shingles and clapboards appears to its 
owner — Vvdio built it and lives in it — any thing 
but ugly or unpicturesque : so far from it, it fits 
him like a shell. Our climate has something to 
answer for with respect to this scarcity of ornament 
and beauty. The subtle influence of the weather 
crops out in the very clapboards, as it does also in 
the garments of the farmer, who gets their benefits : 
the untamable burning siunmer, the fatally pene- 
trative winter, with warm places sometimes inter- 
calated, when the honey-bees come forth and the 
black ploughed fields shine like a horse after he 
has been rubbed down. Brick and stone are too 
damp, and the wall-paper will mould and the cellar 
run with water, even in the dryest wooden house, 
unless it be warmed throughout, so pungent is the 



THE LATTER YEAR. 179 

condensing essence of winter. Then, if you put 
on outside adorning, it will be warred upon to such 
a degree by the elements as to be scarcely appro- 
priate to the plain fancies of our farmers: the face 
of the house is only a mirror of the climate. The 
roof should have sufficient steepness to carry off 
rain and snow readily, with as few breaks and 
angles as possible ; the windows not too large, — 
in fact, waTmth and coolness must, in one of these 
New England houses, be consulted at the same 
time, situated as they are in an excessive climate. 
On the sea-coast the old houses are usually one 
story high, thus offering the least surface to the 
wind. The low cottage, all on one floor, will not 
keep us cool in summer ; and the high Italian style 
is a comb of ice in February. Then I know that 
Mr. Gilpin censures the location of the farm-build- 
ings so close upon the road, and that he wishes to 
set them at the end of an avenue a long distance 
from the entrance-gate ; that he equally detests 
the position of the barn within a few rods of the 
house, — privacy, good taste, refinement, as he 
says, are thus all sacrificed at one blow. Our far- 
mers cut the timber for their mansions in their own 
woods, shape it themselves, and bring it upon the 
ground. Utility, economy, comfort, and use, — a 
dr}^, warm cellar, a sweet, airy milk-room, a large 
wood-shed, a barn with its cellars and accommoda- 



180 ^ THOREAIT. 

tions, and all in the most solid style, — these matters 
make the study of the farmer. He desires a house 
to live in, not to look at. He must have a pump 
in the kitchen and one in the cow-yard ; and the 
kitchen, indeed, needs to be much considered. It 
should be warm, airy, well-lighted, connected with 
cellar, shed, yard, road, — and in fact it is a room in 
use most of the time. The barn and house must 
be placed with reference to the farm itself : near a 
village, school, church, store, post-office, station, 
and the like. All this, it is true, has little to do 
with the fine art of architecture. Our native demo- 
crat, whose brains, boots, and bones are spent in 
composing a free republic and earning money, is 
growing up to the fine arts, even if at present utility 
sways the balance. 

This creature, whose portrait you have thus fan- 
cifully drawn, looks like a mere machine for gravi- 
tating to pork and potatoes, an economical syllogism. 
I say beauty must have an equal place with utility, 
if not a precedent. Your farmer shirks architecture 
and landscape-gardening, with one leg in the barn 
and the other in the kitchen, and the compost-heap 
in the midst ; and whose highest ambition is to have 
a patent-leather top to his carriage. Go to ! you 
libel my jolly countrpnan. He is no such thieving 
rat as this, with a singed tail and his ears snipped 
off. The duke king of T'se had a thousand 



THE LATTER YEAR. 181 

teams, each of four horses ; hut on the day of 
his death the jjcople did not praise him for a 
single virtue. 

O hrother Gilpin ! liearken ere you die. Those 
inveterate prejudices of yours for Vitruvius and 
Inigo Jones liave left you too little sympathy with 
the iudustrious, ahle yeoman of New England. I 
have but drawn a few lines of his portrait. The 
climate is close, the soil difHcult, the clapboard edi- 
fice not alluring in its aspect. Let this be so : the 
creator of it, the citizen, stands up like a king in 
the midst of the local penury. How well he can 
write and cipher! how intelligent! He receives 
the news from all lands each day in his paper, 
and has his monthly journals and lyceum lectures. 
There is a sweetness, a native pride, in the man, 
that overtops the rugged necessities of his con- 
dition, and shoots its fine branches heavenward. 
His healthful economic industry, and that practical 
education derived from a constant use of natural 
elements, and a life-long struggle against difficul- 
ties, renders him incredibly expert and capable of 
seizing all expedients whereby he can better his 
conditions. The New England farmer has proved 
that an independent man, a democratic citizen, on 
a poor soil and in unfavorable j)ositions, can over- 
come the outward obstacles. He has solved the 
.problem of democracy, and must give place to some 



182 TEOREAU. 

new forms of society, when all the arts shall be 
employed in the construction of the estate. 

" Born nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold, 
And trains us on to slight the new as if it were the old; 
And blest is he who playing deep, yet haply asks not why, 
Too busy with the crowded day to fear to live or die." 

WALDEN. 

I believe you take some note of the seasons. 
Pray, what is this ? On our old j)iith to Walden 
Pond I cannot really decide whether I or the world 
have had the opiate. Assuredly it must be autumn, 
if it is not summer. How tacitly the pond sleeps ! 
These pine-stumps, after the pitch is dry, make 
excellent seats. The semi-clouded sky images itself 
so truthfully in the slumbering water that sky and 
water form one piece, and the glancing swallows 
flying above that invisible surface seem to be play- 
ing with their own images reversed. Not with the 
very utmost scrutiny can I distinguish between the 
twain. And so you think the superiorities of the 
Englishman grow out of his insular climate. Shake- 
speare's beauties were never cradled on the rack of 
a New English summer. If our landscape stew 
with heat, the brain becomes another stew-pan. 
As most of our days are unutterably brilliant, I 
enjoy the few scattered gray and lowering ones, 
half-shade and half-shine, the negative days : — 



THE LATTER YEAB. 183 

" In the turbulent beauty 
Of a gusty autumn day, 
Poet on a sunny headland 
Sighed his soul away. 
Farms the sunny landscape dappled, 
Swan-down clouds dappled the farms, 
Cattle lowed in hollow distance 
Where far oaks outstretched their arms. 
Sudden gusts came full of meaning, 
All too much to him they said, 
South winds have long memories, 
Of that be none afraid. 
I cannot tell rude listeners 
Half the tell-tale south wind said, 
'Twould bring the blushes of yon maples 
To a man and to a maid." 

The golden loveliness of autumn, — was that 
your phrase ? 

Rather fine, methinks, for the like of me ! 

A pretty rustic wreath could be braided of wild 
berries now, including such as the dark blue magi- 
cal berries of the red-osier cornel, the maple-leaved 
viburnum with its small bluish-black berries, and, 
though so fragile, we might acid, for the passing 
hour, the purple might of the great elderberry 
clusters. Why not wreathe wild grapes, prinos, 
and smilax berries together, and the berries of the 
andromeda ? Then the purple-stemmed golden-rod 
and the blue gentian's flowers should not be omit- 
ted from this votive offering to Ceres ; and it 
should be suspended from a white-maple whence 
we could steal a glimpse through the charming 



184 THOREAU. 

Septembrian sunflood with its sense of fulness and 
everlasting life, over the quivering river that is 
blue and sunny, silvery, golden, and azure at once, 
transparent olives and olive-greens glazed to a com- 
plete polish, and bounded by the softest shimmer, 
not transparent. I have been reading a report on 
herbaceous plants. The mere names of reeds and 
grasses, of the milkweeds and the mints, the gen- 
tians, the mallows and trefoils, are poems. Erige- 
ron, because it grows old early, is the old man of 
the spring ; Pyrola umhellata is called cMmaphila^ 
lover of winter, since its green leaves look so 
cheerful in the snow ; also called prince's-pine. 
The plantain QPlantago major^, which follows m?tn 
wherever he builds a house, is called by the Indians 
white-man's foot ; and I like well to see a mother 
or one of her girls stepping outside of the door 
with a lamp, for its leaf, at night, to dress some 
slight wound or inflamed hand or foot. My old 
pet, the Liatris, acquires some new interest from 
being an approA^ed remedy for the bite of serpents, 
and hence called rattlesnake's-master. Fire-weed, 
or Hieracium^ springs up abundantly on burnt land. 
The aromatic fields of dry Gnaphalium with its 
pearly incorruptible flowers, and the sweet-flags 
with their bayonet-like flash, wave again, thanks to 
this dull professor, in my memory, on even a cold 
winter's morning. Even the naming of tlie local- 



THE LATTER YEAR. 185 

ities — ponds, shady woods, wet pastures, and the 
like — comfort us. But this heavy country professor 
insults some of my favorites, — the well-beloVed Les- 
fedeza., for instance ; the beautiful Ejngcea., or May- 
flower, — pride of Plj^mouth hermits. The hills 
still bear the remembrance of sweet berries ; and I 
suppose the apple or the huckleberry to have this 
comfortable fitness to the human palate, because 
they are only the palate inverted : one is man eating, 
and the other man eatable. The 3Iikania scandeiis, 
with its purplish-white flowers, now covers the 
button-bushes and willows, by the side of streams ; 
and the large-flowered bidens (^chrysanthemoides)^ 
and various-colored polygonums, white and reddish 
and red, stand high among the bushes and weeds by 
the river-side ; and, in modest seclusion, our scarlet 
imperialists, the lordly Cardinals. 

You have a rare season in your shanty by the 
pond. 

I have gained considerable time for study and 
writing, and proved to my satisfaction that life may 
be maintained at less cost and labor than by the 
old social plan. Yet I would not insist upon any 
one's trying it who has not a pretty good sup- 
ply of internal sunshine ; otherwise he would have, 
I judge, to spend too much of his time in fighting 
with his dark humors. To live alone comfortably, 
we must have that self-comfort which rays out of 
Nature, — a portion of it at least. 



186 THOREAU. 

I sometimes feel the coldest days 
A beam upon the snow-drift thrown, 

As if the sun's declining rays 

Were with his summer comforts sown. 

The icy marsh, so cold and gray, 

Hemmed with its alder copses brown, 

The ruined walls, the dying day, 

Make in my dream a landscape crown. 

And sweet the walnuts in the fall. 
And bright the apples' lavished store ; 

Thus sweet my winter's pensive call, 
O'er cold, gray marsh, o'er upland hoar. 

And happier still that we can roam 
Free and untrammelled o'er the land. 

And think the fields and clouds are home, 
Nor forced to press some stranger's hand. 



MULTUM IN FAEVO. 187 



CHAPTER XI. 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 

" There's nothing left 
Unto Andrugio but Andrugio : and that 
Not mischief, force, distress, nor hell can take; 
Fortune my fortunes not my mind shall shake." 

Marston". 

" There, your Majesty, what a glimpse, as into infinite extinct Conti- 
nents, filled with ponderous, thorny inanities, invincible nasal drawling of 
didactic Titans, and the awful attempt to spin, on all manner of wheels, 
road-hamess out of split cobwebs : Hoom ! Hoom-m-m ! Harness not to 
be had on those terms." — Carlyle. 

" My dears, you are like the heroines of romance, — jewels in abundance, 
but scarce a rag to your backs." — Madame de Skvigne. 



A S already noticed, Tboreau believed that one 
of the arts of life was to make the most 
out of it. He loved the multum in parvo^ or pot- 
luck ; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he 
was in the habit of saying, — Give me healthy 
senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe 
freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. 
But this should have availed him little, if he had 
not been at the same time copiously endowed with 
the power of recording what he imbibed. His 
senses truly lived twice. 

Many thousands of travellers pass under the tel- 
egraph-poles, and descry in them only a line of 



188 TEOBEAU. 

barked chestnuts : to our poet-naturalist they 
came forth a Dodona's sacred grove, and like the 
old Grecian landscapes followed the phantasy of 
our Concord Orpheus, twanging on their road. 

"As I went under the new telegraph wire, I 
heard it vibrating like a harp high over head : it 
was as the sound of a far-off glorious life, a super- 
nal life which came down to us and vibrated the 
lattice-work of this life of ours, — an JEolian harp. 
It reminded me, I say, with a certain pathetic mod- 
eration, of what finer and deeper stirrings I was 
susceptible. It said : Bear in mind, child, and 
never for an instant forget, that there are higher 
planes of life than this thou art now travelling 
on. Know that the goal is distant, and is upward. 
There is every degree of inspiration, from mere 
fulness of life to the most rapt mood. A human 
soul is played on even as this wire : I make my 
own use of the telegraph, without consulting the 
directors, like the sparrows, which, I observe, use 
it extensively for a perch. Shall I not, too, go to 
this office ? The sound proceeds from near the 
posts, where the vibration is apparently more rapid. 
It seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was 
filled with music. As I put my ear to one of the 
posts, it labored with the strains, as if every fibre 
was affected, and being seasoned or timed, rear- 
ranged according to a new and more harmonious 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 189 

law : every swell and change and inflection of 
tone pervaded it, and seemed to proceed from the 
wood, the divine tree or wood, as if its very sub- 
stance was transmuted. 

" What a recipe for preserving wood, to fill its 
pores with music ! How this wild tree from the 
forest, stripped of its bark and set up here, rejoices 
to transmit this music. When no melody proceeds 
from the wire, I hear the hum within the entrails of 
the wood, the oracular tree, acquiring, accumulat- 
ing the prophetic fury. The resounding wood, — 
how much the ancients would have made of it I 
To have had a harp on so great a scale, girdling the 
very earth, and played on by the winds of every 
latitude and longitude, and that harp were (so to 
speak) the manifest blessing of Heaven on a work 
of man's. Shall we not now add a tenth Muse to 
those immortal Nine, and consider that this inven- 
tion was most divinely honored and distinguished, 
upon which the Muse has thus condescended to 
smile, — this magic medium of communication with 
mankind ? To read that the ancients stretched a 
wire round the earth, attaching it to the trees of 
the forest, on which they sent messages by one 
named Electricity, father of Lightning and Magnet- 
ism, swifter far than Mercury, — the stern commands 
of war and news of peace ; and that the winds 
caused this wire to vibrate, so that it emitted 



190 TEOREAU. 

a harp-like and JEolian music in all the lands 
through which it passed, as if to express the satis- 
faction of the gods in this invention ! And this is 
fact, and yet we have attributed the instrument to 
no god. I hear the sound working terribly within. 
When I put my ear to it, anon it swells into a 
clear tone, which seems to concentrate in the core 
of the tree, for all the sound seems to proceed from 
the wood. It is as if you had entered some world- 
cathedral, resounding to some vast organ. The 
fibres of all things have their tension, and are 
strained like the strings of a lyre. I feel the very 
ground tremble underneath my feet, as I stand near 
the post. The Avire vibrates with great power, as 
if it would strain and rend the wood. What an 
awful and fateful music it must be to the worms 
in the wood. No better vermifuge were needed. 
As the wood of an old Cremona, its every fibre, 
perchance, harmoniously transposed and educated 
to resound melody, has brought a great price, so 
methinks these telegraph-posts should bear a great 
price with musical instrument-makers. It is pre- 
pared to be the material of harps for ages to 
come ; as it were, put a-soak in and seasoning in 
music." 

" How could the patient pine have known 
The morning breeze would come ? 
Or humble flowers anticipate 
The insect's noonday hum ? " 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 191 

Mncli more was he, who drew this ravishing noise 
off a stale post, a golden wire of communication 
with the blessed divinities ! With poetic insight 
he married practical perception, avoiding that fly- 
ing off in space like the writings of some who pur- 
sued the leading of the Rev. Bismiller, where there 
is the theatrical breadth of a pasteboard sky, with 
not much life rolling in it, 

" But troops of smoothing people that coUaud 
All that we do/' 

Or, as he observes, " Not till after several months 
does an infant find its hands, and it may be seen look- 
ing at them with astonishment, holding them up to 
the light ; and so also it finds its toes. How many 
faculties there are which we have never found I We 
want the greatest variety within the smallest com- 
pass, and yet without glaring diversity, and we have 
it in the color of the withered oak-leaves." He 
speaks of fleets of yellow butterflies, and of the gray 
squirrels on their winding way, on their unweariable 
legs. Distant thunder is the battle of the air. " A 
cow looking up at the sky has an almost human or 
wood-god, fawn-like expression, and reminded me 
of some frontispiece to Virgil's Bucolics. When 
the red-eye ( Vireo') ceases, then, I think, is a cri- 
sis. The pigeons, with their quivet^ dashed over 
the Duganne desert." . . . When the snow-birds 
flew off, their wave actually broke over him, as if he 



192 TEOREAU. 

were a rock. He sees two squirrels answering one 
to the other, as it were, like a vibrating watch- 
spring, — they withdrew to their airy houses. . . . 
" When turnino^ mv head I looked at the wil- 
lowy edges of Cyanean meadow, and onward to 
the sober-colored but fine-grained Clam-shell hills, 
about which there was no glitter, I was inclined 
to think that the truest beauty was that which sur- 
rounded us, but which we failed to discern ; that 
the forms and colors which adorn our daily life, 
not seen afar in the horizon, are our fairest jew- 
elry. The beauty of Clam-shell hill near at hand, 
with its sandy ravines, in which the cricket chirps, 
— this is an occidental city, not less glorious than we 
dream of in the sunset skj^ 

" At Clematis Brook I jDcrceive that the pods or 
follicles of the common milkweed (^Ascle/nas %y- 
riacd) now point upward. They are already burst- 
ing. I release some seeds with the long, fine silk 
attached : the fine threads fly apart at once (open 
with a sj^ring), and then ray themselves out into a 
hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from 
its neighbor, and all reflecting rainbow or prismatic 
tints. The seeds beside are furnished with wings, 
which plainly keep them steady, and prevent their 
whirling round. I let one go, and it rises slowly 
and uncertainly at first, now driven this way, then 
that, by currents which I cannot perceive, and I 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 193 

fear it will shipwreck against the neighboring wood ; 
but no ! as it approaches it, it surely rises above it, 
and then feeling the strong north wind it is borne 
off rapidly in the opposite direction, ever rising 
higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about 
with every fluctuation of the gale, till at a hundred 
feet above the earth, and fifty rods off, steering 
south, I lose sight of it. I watched this milkweed- 
seed, for the time, with as much interest as his 
friends did Mr. Lauriat disappearing in the skies. 
How many myriads go sailing away at this season, 
— high over hill and meadow and river, to plant 
their race in new locaHties, — on various tacks, until 
the wind lulls, who can tell how many miles! 
And for this end these silken streamers have been 
perfecting all summer, snugly packed in this hght 
chest, a prophecy not only of the fall, but of future 
springs. Who could believe in the prophecies of a 
Daniel or of Miller, that the world wo aid end this 
summer, while one milkweed with faith matured 
its seeds ? Densely packed in a little oblong chest, 
armed with soft, downy prickles, and lined with a 
smooth, silky lining, lie some hundreds of seeds, 
pear-shaped, or like a steelyard's poise, which have 
derived their nutriment through a band of ex- 
tremely fine, silken threads, attached by their ex- 
tremities to the core. At length, when the seeds 
are matured and cease to require nourishment from 



194 TEOEEAU. 

the parent plant, being weaned, and the pod with 
dryness and frost bursts, the extremities of the silken 
thread detach themselves from the core, and from 
being the conduits of nutriment to the seed become 
the buoyant balloon which, like some spiders' webs, 
bear the seeds to new and distant fields. They 
merely serve to buoy up the full-fed seeds, far finer 
than the finest thread. Think of the great variety 
of balloons which, at this season, are buoyed up by 
similar means. I am interested in the fate, or suc- 
cess, of every such venture which the autumn 
sends forth." 

A well-known writer says he looked at the pres- 
ent moment as a man does upon a card upon which 
he has staked a considerable sum, and who seeks 
to enhance its value as much as he can without 
exaggeration. Thoreau had a like jDractice, — the 
great art is judiciously to limit and isolate one's 
self, and life is so short we must miss no oppor- 
tunity of giving pleasure to one another. No 
doubt our author's daily writing, his careful obser- 
vation in his own mind, lay as a mass of gold, out 
of which he should coin a good circulating medium 
for the benefit of other minds. Nothing which has 
not sequence is of any value in life. And he held 
to that oft-repeated dictum, " Whatever is very 
good sense must have been common-sense in all 
times. I fairly confess I have served myself all 
I could by writing : that I made use of the judg- 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 195 

ment of authors, dead and living. If I have writ- 
ten well, let it be considered it is what no man 
can do without good sense, — a quality that ren- 
ders one not only capable of being a good writer, 
but a good man. To take more pains and employ 
more time cannot fail to produce more complete 
pieces. The ancients constantly applied to art, 
and to that single branch of an art to which their 
talent was most powerfully bent ; and it was the 
business of their lives to correct and finish their 
works for posterity : — 

" Nor Eame I slight, nor for her favors call ; 
She comes unlook'd for, if she comes at all. — 
Who pants for glory finds but short repose." 

Then thinkers are so varied. The Mahometans 
taught fate in religion, and that nothing exists that 
does not suppose its contrary. Some believe that 
cork-trees grow merely that we may have stoppers 
to our bottles. St. Augustine, in his City of 
God, mentions a man who could perspire when he 
pleased. Napoleon classed the Old and New Tes- 
taments, and the Koran, under the head of politics. 
One says, a fact of our lives is valuable, not accord- 
ing as it is true, but as it is significant. Thoreau 
would scarcely have upheld this. But he could 
assert " that no greater evil can happen to any one 
than to hate reasoning. Man is evidently made 
for thinking : this is the whole of his dignity, and 



196 THOREAU. 

the whole of his merit. To think as he ought is the 
whole of his duty." 

After our dear lover of Nature had retired from 
Walden, a rustic rhymer hung up on the walls of 
his deserted sanctuary some irregular verses, as an 
interpretation : — 

WALDEN HERMITAGE. 

Who bricked this chimney small 

I well do know ; 

Know who spread the mortar on the wall, 

And the shingles nailed through ; 

Yes, have seen thee, 

Thou small, rain-tinted hermitage ! 

And spread aside the pitch-pine tree 

That shaded the brief edge 

Of thy snug roof, — 

'Twas water-proof! 

Have seen thee, Walden lake ! 
Like burnished glass to take 
With thy daguerreotype 
Each cloud, each tree, 
More firm yet free. 
Have seen and known, — 
Yes, as I hear and know 
Some echo's faintest tone. 
All, all have fled, 
Man, and cloud, and shed. 

" What man was this. 
Who thus could build, 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 197 

Of what complexion, 

At what learning skilled ? 

That the lake I see down there, 

Like a glass of simmering air?" 

So might that stranger say. 

To him I might reply, — 

"You ask me for the man. Hand me yesterday. 

Or to-morrow, or a star from the sky : 

More mine are they than he ; 

But that he lived, I tell to thee. 

** Might I say 
He was brave. 
As a cold winter's day. 
Or the waves that toss their spray ; 
Brave, 

So is the lion brave. 
And the wind that braids a song 
On the corded forest's sfonsr. 

" That man's heart was true. 
As the sky in living blue. 
And the old contented rocks 
That the mountains heap in blocks. 
Wilt thou dare to do as he did, 
Dwell alone and bide thy time? 
Not with lies be over-rid, 
And turn thy griefs to iliyme ? 
True ! do you call him true? 
Look upon the eaglet's eye, 
Wheeled amid the freezing blue, 
In the unfathomable sky, 
With cold and blasts and light his speed to try ! 



198 THOBEAU. 

" And should I tell thee that this man was good ? 
Never thought his neighbor harm, 
Sweet was it where he stood, 
Sunny all, and warm. 
Good? 

So the rolling star seems good, 
That miscalculates not, 
Nor sparkles a jot 
Out of its place. 
Period of unlettered space." 

Now might once more some stranger ask, 
I should reply : 
" Why this man was high 
And lofty is not his task. 
Nor mine, to tell : 
Springs flow from the invisible. 
But on this shore he used to play, 
There bis boat he hid away. 
And where has this man fled to-day ? 
Mark the small, gray hermitage 
Touch yon curved lake's sandy edge ; 
The pines are his you firmly see, 
All before the clifi" so high. 

" He never goes, — 
But must thou come. 
As the wind blows. 
He sits surely at home. 
In his eye the thing must stand. 
In his thought the world command ; 
As a clarion shrills the morn. 
On his arms the world be borne. 



MULTVM IN PARVO. 199 

Beat with thy paddle on the boat, 
Midway the lake, — the wood repeats 
The ordered blow, the echoing note 
Has ended in the ear, yet its retreats 
Contain more possibilities ; 
And in this Man the nature lies 
Of woods so green, 
And lakes so sheen, 
And hennitages edged between." 

A literary disciple, whose shanty stood on Lon- 
don streets, thus vents his history : "I am quite 
familiar at the Chapter Coffee-house, and know all 
the geniuses there. A character is now unneces- 
sary: an author carries hi^ character in his pen. 
Good God, how superior is London to that despica- 
ble Bristol ! The poverty of authors is a common 
observation, but not always a true one. No author 
can be poor who understands the arts of book- 
sellers. [But he don't.] No : it is my pride, my 
damned, native, unconquerable pride, that plunges 
me into distraction." And another asks, " What 
could Stephen Duck do ? what could Chatterton 
do ? Neither of them had opportunities of enlarg- 
ing their stock of ideas. No man can coin guineas 
but in proportion as he has gold." Even that 
touch ujjon booksellers' arts did not prevent our 
brother from starving to death three months after 
in London. 



200 TEOREAU. 

Thoreau would not have said, with Yoltaire, 
" J.A, croyez-moi^ Verreitr a son merited'' — believe 
me, sin has something worthy in it, — which is the 
same as Goethe's " Even in God I discover defects ; " 
but he would recognize the specific value of events. 
The directions of men are singular. He knew one 
in Sudbury who used to fat mud-turtles, having a 
great appetite for them ; another used to eat those 
imposthumes on wild rose-bushes, which are made 
by worms and contain an ounce of maggots each. 
But why criticise poor human nature, when a black 
snake that has just laid her eggs on a tussock 
in the meadow (some were hatching, and some 
hatched), upon being alarmed, swallows them all 
down in a lump for safe keeping, and no doubt pro- 
duces them afresh at a convenient time ? Nature, as 
Thoreau said, does have her dawn each day ; and her 
economical code of laws does not consult taste or high 
art, as in the above salvation of so inconvenient a 
morsel as a snake's offspring. He sometimes caught 
sight of the inside of things by artificial means ; and 
notices that the young mud-turtle is a liierogiyphic 
of snappishness a fortnight before it is hatched, like 
the virtue of bottled cider. "When the robin 
ceases, then I think is an exit, . . . the concert is 
over." He could see a revolution in the end of a 
bird's song, and used working abroad like the 
artist who painted out-of-doors, and believed that 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 201 

lights and a room were absurdities, and that a pict- 
ure could be painted anywhere. So must a man 
be moral everywhere, and he must not expect that 
Nature will take a scrubbing-brush and clean her 
entries for his steps, seeing how sentimental a 
fellow is our brother. 

The Bomhyx pini, the pine spider, the most 
destructive of all forest insects, is infested, so says 
Ratzeburg, by thirty-five parasitical ichneumonidae. 
And infirmity that decays the wise doth ever make 
the better fool. 

" Not to know at large of things remote 
From use, obscure and subtle, but to know 
That which before us lies in daily use." 

The love of our poet-naturalist for the open air, 
his hj'piethral character, has been dwelt upon. 
Such was his enjoyment in that outward world, it 
seemed as if his very self became a cast of nature, 
with the outlines of humanity fair and perfect ; but 
that intensity of apprehension did, with certain 
minds, accuse him of egotism. Yet not self, but 
rather that creation of which he was a part, asserted 
itself there. As it is said : — 

" For chiefly here thy worth, — 
Greatly in this, that unabated trust. 
Amplest reliance on the unceasing truth 
That rules the darting sphere about us, 
That drives round the unthinking ball, 
And buds the ignorant germs on life and tune, 
9* 



202 TEOBEAU. 

Of men and beasts and birds, themselves the sport 
Of a clear, healthful prescience, still unspent." 

He admired plants and trees : truly, he loved 
tliem. Doubt not that it was their infinite beauty 
which first imj)ressed them on him, and then he 
greatly held that art of science which, taking up 
the miscellaneous crowd, impaled them on the 
picket-fences of order, and coined a labelled scien- 
tific plan from the phenomenal waste-basket of 
vulgar observation. And a hearty crack in Latin 
he rejoiced at ; not merely because he had digested 
it early, but as a stencil-tool for the mind. He 
prized a substantial name for a thing beyond most 
sublunary joys. Name it ! name it I he might have 
cried to the blessed fortune. 

" He shall be as a god to me who can rightly 
define and divide. The subjects on which the 
master did not talk were, — extraordinary things, 
feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings. 
What the superior man seeks is in himself : what 
the mean man seeks is in others. By weighing we 
know what things are light and what heavy ; by 
measuring we know what things are long and what 
short. It is of the greatest importance to measure 
the motions of the mind." 

" Mills of the gods do slowly wind, 
But they at length to powder grind." 

He loved what the Prussian king says to his 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 203 

brother, — "I write this letter with the rough 
common-sense of a German, who speaks what he 
thinks, without employing equivocal terms and 
loose assuagements which disfigure the truth." 
But it may be feared he would have stopped run- 
ning, when Fichte thus lays his finger on the des- 
tination of man: ''My consciousness of the object 
is only a yet unrecognized consciousness of my 
production of the representation of an object ; '* 
although he admired the poet's description, — 

" My mother bore me in the southern wild, 

And I am black, but, oh ! my soul is white, — 
White as an angel is the English child. 
But I am black as if bereaved of light." 

For pure, nonsensical abstractions he had no 
taste. No work on metaphysics found room on 
his shelves unless by sufferance ; there being some 
Spartan metaphysicians who send you their books, 
like the witty lecturer wdio sent out cards of invi- 
tation to his lectures, when you had to come. 
Neither did he keep moral treatises, . though he 
woukl not say, what we call good is nothing else 
than egoism painted with verbiage, like the French- 
man. " Slick your nose into any gutter, entity, 
or object, this of Motion or another, with obstinacy, 
you will easily drown if that be your determina- 
tion. Time, at its own pleasure, will untie the 
knot of destiny, if there be one, like a shot of 



204 TEOREAV. 

electricity tlirough an elderly, sick lions eliold cat." 
We do not bind onrselves to men by exaggerating 
those pecnHarities in wbicli we happen to differ 
from them. 

" I perceive on the bine vervain ( Verbena has- 
tata) that only one circle of buds, about half-a- 
dozen, blossoms at a time ; and there are about 
thirty circles in the space of three inches, while 
the next circle of buds above at the same time shows 
the blue. -Thus the triumphant blossoming circle 
travels upward, driving the remaining buds off into 
space. It is very pleasant to measure the progress 
of the season by this and similar clocks. So you 
get not the absolute, but the true time of the 
season. These genera of plants suggest a history 
to nature, — a natural history, in a new sense. Any 
anomaly in vegetation makes Nature seem more real 
and present in her working, as the various red and 
yellow excrescences on young oaks. As if a poet 
were born who had designs in his head ! Animals 
are often manifestly related to the plants, which 
they feed upon or live among, as caterpillars, but- 
terflies, tree-toads, partridges, chewinks. I noticed 
a yelloAv spider on a golden-rod. The interreg- 
num in the blossoming of flowers being well over 
(August 24th), many small flowers blossom now in 
the low grounds, having just reached their spring. 
What a miserable name to the G-ratiola aitrea^ 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 205 

hedge-hyssop. Whose hedge does it grow by, 
pray, m this part of the world? Ruhiis semper- 
virens, the small, low blackberry, is now (August 
27th) in fruit ; the Medeola Virginica^ cucumber- 
root, is now in green fruit ; and the Poly gala cruci- 
ata^ cross-leaved polygala, with its handsome calyx 
and leaves." 

On such Latin thorns do botanists hang the Lilies 
of the Vale, — things that can only be crucified 
into order upon the justification of a splitting-hair 
microscope. We are assured they have no nerves, 
sharing the comfort with naturalists. 

" The ivy-leaves are turning red ; fall dande- 
lions stand thick in the meadows. The leaves on 
the hardback are somewhat appressed^ clothing the 
stem and showing their downy under-sides, like 
white waving wands. I walk often in drizzly 
weather, for then the small weeds (especially if 
they stand on bare ground), covered with rain- 
drops like beads, look more beautiful than ever. 
They are equally beautiful when covered with dew, 
fresh and adorned, almost spirited away in a robe 
of dewdrops. At the Grape Cliffs the few bright 
red leaves of the tupelo contrast with the polished 
green ones, — the tupelos with drooping branches. 
The grape-vines, over-running and bending down 
the maples, form little arching bowers over the 
meadow five or six feet in diameter, like parasols 



206 THOREAU. 

held over the ladies of the harem in the East. The 
rhomboidal joints of the tick trefoil QBesmodium 
paniculatum) adhere to my clothes, and thus dis- 
perse themselves. The oak-ball is a dirty drab 
now. When I got into the Lincoln road, I per- 
ceived a singular sweet scent in the air, which 
I suspected arose from some plant now in a pecu- 
liar state owing to the season (September 11th) ; 
but though I smelled every thing around I could 
not detect it, but the more eagerly I smelled the 
further I seemed to be from finding it ; but when 
I gave up the search, again it would be wafted to 
me, the intermitting perfume ! It was one of the 
sweet scents which go to make the autumn air, 
— which fed my sense of smell rarely, and dilated 
my nostrils. I felt the better for it. Methinks 
that I possess the sense of smell in greater per- 
fection than usual, and have the habit of smelling 
of every plant I pluck. How autumnal now is 
the scent of ripe grapes by the road-side ! The 
cross-leaved polygala emits its fragrance as if at 
will. You must not hold it too near, but on all 
sides and at all distances. How beautiful the 
sprout-land, a young wood thus springing up ! 
Shall man then despair ? Is he not a sprout-land 
too? 

" In Cohosh Swamp the leaves have turned a 
very deep red, but have not lost their fragrance. 



MULTUM IN PAEVO. 207 

I notice wild apples growing luxuriantly in the 
midst of the swamp, rising red over the colored, 
painted leaves of the sumac, reminding me that 
they were colored by the same influences, — some 
green, some yellow, some red. I fell in with a 
man whose breath smelled of spirit, which he had 
drunk. How could I but feel it was his OWK 
spirit that I smelt ? A sparrow-hawk, hardly so 
big as a night-hawk, flew over high above my 
head, — a pretty little, graceful fellow, too small 
and delicate to be rapacious. I found a grove of 
young sugar-maples. How silently and yet start- 
lingly the existence of these was revealed to me, 
which I had not thought grew in my immediate 
neighborhood, when first I perceived the entire 
edges of its leaves and their obtuse sinuses ! Such 
near hills as Nobscot and Nashoba have lost all 
their azure in this clear air, and plainly belong to 
earth. Give me clearness, nevertheless, though 
my heavens be moved further off to pay for it. It 
is so cold I am glad to sit behind the wall ; still, 
the great bidens blooms by the causeway side, 
beyond the bridge. On Mount Misery were some 
very rich yellow leaves (clear yellow) of the Fofu- 
lus grandidentata^ which still love to wag and 
tremble in my hands." 

This qualification hides the plant celebrated by 
the entombed novelist, Walter Scott, when ho 
speaks of — • 



208 THOREAU. 

" the shade 
By the light quivering aspen made." 

It is a poplar whose leaves are soft and tremulous, 
and some botanist has smashed his Latinity on the 
little, trembling, desponding thing. We shall next 
be required to ask, " What 's yours? " To Henry 
these names were a treat, and possessed a flavor 
beyond the title of emperor. 

The river never failed to act as a Pacific for his 
afternoon, and few things gave him so great a 
delight as a three hours' voyage on this mitigated 
form of Amazon. 

" Seek then, again, the tranquil river's breast. 
July awakes new splendor in the stream. 
Yet more than all, the water-lily's pomp, 
A star of creamy perfume, born to be 
Consoler to thy solitary voyage. 
In vast profusion from the floor of pads, 
They floating swim, with their soft beauty decked; 
Nor sHght the pickerel-weed, whose violet shaft 
Controls the tall reed's emerald, and endows 
With a contrasted coloring the shore. 
No work of human art can faintly show 
The unnoticed lustre of these summer plants, 
These floating palaces, these anchored orbs, 
These spikes of untold richness crowning earth. 
The muskrat glides, and perch and pout display 
Their arrowy swiftness, while the minnows dart 
And fright the filmy silver of the pool ; 
And the high-colored bream, a ring of gems, 
Their circular nests scoop in the yellow sands. 
And never ask, Why was this beauty wasted 
On these banks 1 nor soon believe that love in vain 
Is lavished on the solitude, nor deem 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 209 

Absence of human life absence of all ! 

Why is not here an answer to thy thought ? 

Or mark in August, when the twilight falls : 

Like wreaths of timid smoke her curling mist 

Poured from some smouldering fire across 

The meadows cool, whose modest shadows thrown 

So faintly seem to fall asleep with day. 

Oh, softly pours the thin and curling mist ! 

Thou twilight hour ! abode of peace how deep, 

May we not envy him who in thee dwells ? 

And, like thy soft and gently falling beauty, 

His repose, — dreams on the flood-tide of the soul." 

Or let us hear this dear lover of wood and glen, 
of early morn and deep midnight, sing a strain of 
the autumnal wind as it goes hurrying about, re- 
gardless of the plucked mannikins freezing amid 
its polarities : — 

" The wind roars amid the pines like the surf. 
You can hardly hear the crickets for the din or the 
cars. Such a blowing, stirring, bustling day ! what 
does it mean? All light things decamp, straws 
and loose leaves change their places. It shows 
the white and silvery under-sides of the leaves. 
I perceive that some farmers are busy cutting turf 
now. You dry and burn the very earth itself. I 
see the volumes of smoke, — not quite the blaze, 
— from burning brush, as I suppose, far in the 
western horizon : the farmers' simple enterprises ! 
They improve this season, — which is the dryest, 
— their haying being done and their harvest not 
begun, to do these jobs : burn brush, build 



210 THOREAU. 

walls, dig clitclies, cut turf, also topping corn and 
digging potatoes. May not the succory, tree-prim- 
rose, and other plants, be distributed from Boston 
on the rays of the railroad ? The shorn meadows 
looked of a living green at eve, even greener than 
in spring. This reminded me of the fenum cor- 
dum^ the after-math ; sicilimenta de pratis, the 
second mowing of the meadow, in Cato. His 
remedy for sprains would be as good in some cases 
as opedeldoc. You must repeat these words: 
' Hauat, hauat, hauat ista pista sista damia bo- 
danna ustra.' And his notion of an auction would 
have had a fitness in the South : ' If you wish to 
have an auction, sell off your oil, if it will fetch 
something, and any thing in the wine and corn line 
left over ; sell your old oxen, worthless sheep and 
cattle, old wool, hides and carts ; old tools, old 
slaves and sick slaves ; and if you can scrape up 
any more trash, sell it along with them.' I now 
begin to pick wild apples. 

" We scared a calf out of the meadows, which ran, 
like a shij) tossed on the waves, over the hills : they 
run awkwardly, — red, oblong squares, tossing up 
and down like a vessel in a storm, with great com- 
motion. I observe that the woodchuck has two or 
more holes, a rod or two apart : one, or the front 
door, where the excavated sand is heaped up ; 
another, not so easily discovered, which is very 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 211 

small, round, and without sand about it, being that 
by which he emerged, and smaller directly at the 
surface than beneath, on the principle by which a 
well is dug. I saw a very fat woodchuck on a 
wall, evidently prepared to go into the ground, — 

" Want and woe which torture us, 
Thy sleep makes ridiculous." 

As the woodchuck dines chiefly on crickets, he 
will not be at much expense in seats for his winter 
quarters. Since the anatomical discovery, that 
the thymoid gland, whose use in man is nihil^ is for 
the purpose of getting digested during the hiber- 
nating jollifications of the woodchuck, we sympa- 
thize less at his retreat. Darwin, who hibernates 
in science, cannot yet have heard of this use of 
the above gland, or he would have derived the 
human race to that amount from the Mus montana^ 
our woodchuck, instead of landing him flat on the 
simiadce, or monkey. We never can remember 
that our botanist took a walk that gave him a poor 
turn or disagreed with him. It is native to him 
to say, — 

" It was pleasant walking where the road was 
shaded by a high hill, as it can be only in the 
morning ; also, looking back, to see a heavy shadow 
made by some high birches reaching quite across 
the road. Light and shadow are sufficient contrast 



212 THOSE AU. 

and furnish sufficient excitement when we are well., 
Now we were passing a sunshiny mead, pastured 
with cattle and sparkling with dew, — the sound of 
crows and swallows was heard in the air, and 
leafy-columned elms stood about, shining with 
moisture. The morning freshness and unworldli-i 
ness of that domain ! When you are starting 
away, leaving your more familiar fields for a little 
adventure like a walk, you look at every object 
with a traveller's, or at least historical, eyes ; you 
pause on the foot-bridge where an ordinary walk 
hardly commences, and begin, to observe and moral- 
ize. It is worth the while to see your native 
village thus, sometimes. The dry grass yields a 
crisped sound to my feet ; the cornstalks, standing 
in stacks in long rows along the edges of the corn- 
fields, remind me of stacks of muskets. As soon 
as berries are gone, grapes come. The flowers of 
the meadow-beauty are literally little reddish chal- 
ices now, though inany still have petals, — little 
crep^m-pitchers. There was a man in a boat, in the 
sun, just disappearing in the distance around a 
bend, hfting high his arms, and dipping his paddles, 
as if he were a vision bound to the land of the 
blessed, far off as in a picture. When I see Con- 
cord to purpose, I see it as if it were not real, but 
painted; and what wonder if I do not speak to 



MULTUM IN PAEVO. 213 

And there was nothing our poet loved or sang 
better, albeit in prose, than the early morning : — 

"Alone, despondent ? then art thou alone. 
On some near hill-top, ere of day tlie orb 
In early summer tints the floating heaven. 
While sunk around thy sleeping race o'ershade 
With more oblivion their dim village-roofs. 

Alone 1 Oh, listen hushed ! 
What living hymn awakes such studious air? 
A myriad sounds that in one song converge, 
As the added light lifts the far hamlet 
Or the distant wood. These are the carols 
Of the unnumbered birds that drench the sphere 
With their prodigious harmony, prolonged 
And ceaseless, so that at no time it dies, 
Vanquishing the expectation with delay. 
Still crowding notes from the wild robin's larum 
In the walnut's bough, to the veery's flute, 
Who, from the inmost shades of the wet wood, 
His liquid lay rallies in martial trills. 
And mark the molten flecks fast on those skies ; 
They move not, musing on their rosy heights 
In pure, celestial radiance. 

Nor these forms, 
That chiefly must engross and ask thy praise. 
It is a startling theme, this lovely birth 
Each mom of a new day, so wholly new. 
So absolutely penetrated by itself, — 
This fresh, this sweet, this ever-living grace, 
This tender joy that still unstinted clothes 
An orb of beauty, of all bliss the abode. 
Cast off the night, unhinge the dream-clasped brow. 
Step freely forth, exulting in thy joy ; 
Launch off, and sip the dewy twilight time ; 
Come ere the last great stars have fled, ere dawn 



214 TEOREAU. 

Like a spirit seen, unveil the charm 

Of bosky wood, deep dell, or odorous plain ; 

Ere, blazed with more than gold, some slow-drawn mist 

Retreats its distant arm from the cool meads." 

As in the song, such a " getting up we never 
saw," our author sallying forth like Don Quixote, 
ere the stingiest farmer commenced milking his 
cow-yard cistern. All that he did was done with 
order due : the late walk came out at two in the 
morning, and the early one came on at the same 
crisis. 

" His drink the running stream, his cup the bare 
Of his palm closed, his bed the hard, cold ground." 

Cleanness, punctuality, the observation of the law 
he truly followed. " Treat with the reverence due 
to age the elders of your own family, so that the 
elders in the families of others shall be similarly 
treated ; treat with the kindness due to youth the 
young in your own family, so that the young in the 
families of others shall be similarly treated: do 
this, a]id the empire may be made to go round in 
your palm." He might have said, with Victor 
Hugo, " The finest of all altars is the soul of an 
unhappy man who is consoled, and thanks God. 
Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant 
qui custodiant earn (Unless God watches over 
our abode, they watch in vain who are set to 
keep it). Let us never fear robbers or murderers. 



MULTUM IN PARVO. 215 

They are external and small dangers : let us 
fear ourselves ; prejudices are the true thefts, 
vices the fatal murders." And his notions about 
the privileges of real property remind us of the 
park of King Van, which contained seventy square 
le ; but the grass-cutters and the fuel-gatherers 
had the privilege of entrance. He shared it with 
the people ; and was it not with reason they 
looked on it as small? Of every ten things he 
knew, he had learned nine in conversation ; and he 
remembered that between friends frequent reproofs 
lead to distance, and that in serving the neighbor 
frequent remonstrances lead to disgrace. Nor did 
he follow that old rule of the nuns, — Believe 
Secular men little, Religious still less. He was 
one of those men of education who, without a 
certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed 
pursuit. 

" Thou art not gone, being gone, where'er thou art : 
Thou leav'st in us thy watchful eyes, in us thy loving heart." 



216 THOREAU. 



CHAPTER XII. 



HIS WRITINGS. 

*' The dark-colored ivy and the untrodden grove of God, with its myriad 
fruits, sunless and without wind in all storms; where always the frenzied 
Dionysus dwells." — Sophocles. 

" When, like the stars, the singing angels shot 
To earth." Giles Fletcher. 

" Patience ! why, 'tis the soul of peace, 
It makes men look like gods! The best of men 
That e'er wore earth about him was a Sufferer, 
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
The first true gentleman that ever breathed." 

Decker. 

•' ' I know not ' is one word ; ' I know ' is ten words."— CniifESE Prov- 
erb. 

" Friendship has passed me like a ship at sea." — Festtjs. 



/^NE of the objects of our poet-naturalist was to 
acquire tlie art of writing a good English style. 
So Goethe, that slow and artful formalist, spent 
himself in acquiring a good German style. And 
what Thore^jU thought of this matter of writing 
may be learned from many passages in this sketch, 
and from this among the rest : " It is the fault of 
some excellent writers, and De Quincey's first im- 
pressions on seeing London suggest it to me, that 
they express themselves with too great fulness and 



EIS WRITINGS. 217 

detail. They give tlie most faithful, natural, and 
lifelike account of their sensations, mental and 
ph3'sical, but they lack moderation and sententious- 
ness. They do not affect us as an ineffectual 
earnest, and a reserve of meaning, like a stutterer : 
the}^ say all they mean. Their sentences are not 
concentrated and nutty, — sentences which suggest 
far more than they say, which have an atmosphere 
about them, which do not report an old, but make 
a new impression ; sentences which suggest on 
many things, and are as durable as a Roman aque- 
duct : to frame these, — that is the art of writing. 
Sentences which are expressive, towards which so 
many volumes, so much life, went ; which lie like 
boulders on the page up and down, or across; 
w^hich contain the seed of other sentences, not 
mere repetition, but creation ; and w^hich a man 
might sell his ground or cattle to build. De Quin- 
cej^'s style is nowhere kinked or knotted up into 
something hard and significant, which you could 
swallow like a diamond, without digesting." 

As in the story, '' And that 's Peg WofQngton's 
notion of an actress ! Better it, Gibber and Brace- 
girdle, if you can ! " This moderation does, for 
the most ijart^ characterize his works, both of prose 
and verse. They have their stoical merits, their 
uncomfortableness ! It is one result to be lean and 
sacrificial, yet a balance of comfort and a house of 
10 



218 THOREAU. 

freestone on the sunny side of Beacon Street can 
be endured in a manner by weak nerves. But the 
fact that our author lived for a while alone in a 
shanty near a pond or stagnum^ and named one of 
his books after the place where it stood, has led 
some to say he was a barbarian or a misanthrope, 
— it was a writing-case : — 

" This, as an amber drop enwraps a bee. 
Covering discovers your quick soul, tliat we 
May in your through-shine front your heart's thoughts see." 

Here, in this wooden inkstand, he wrote a good 
part of his famous " Walden ; " and this solitary 
woodland pool was more to his muse than all 
oceans of the planet, by the force of that faculty 
on which he was never weary of descanting, — 
Imagination. Without this, he says, human life, 
dressed in its Jewish or other gaberdine, would be 
a kind of lunatic's hospital, insane with the prose 
of it, mad with the drouth of society's remainder- 
biscuits ; but add the phantasy, that glorious, that 
divine gift, and then — 

" The earth, the air, and seas I know, and all 
The joys and horrors of their peace and wars ; 
And now will view the gods' state and the stars/' 

Out of. this faculty was his written experience 
chiefly constructed, — upon this he lived ; not 
upon the cracked wheats and bread-fruits of an out- 



EIS WRITINGS. 219 

ward platter. His essays, those masterful crea- 
tions, taking up the commonest topics, a sour 
apple, an autumn leaf, are features of this won- 
drous imagination of his ; and, as it was his very 
life-blood, he, least of all? sets it forth in labored 
description. He did not bring forward his means, 
unlock the closet of his Maelzel's automaton chess- 
player. The reader cares not that the writer of a 
novel, with two lovers in hand, should walk out 
on the fool's-cap, and begin balancing some pea- 
cock's feather on his nose. 

" Begin, murderer, — leave thy damnable faces, and begin ! " 

He loved antithesis in verse. It could pass for 
paradox, — something subtractive and unsatisfac- 
tory, as the four herrings provided by Caleb Balder- 
stone for Ravenswood's dinner : come, he says, let 
us see how miserably uncomfortable we can feel. 
Hawthorne, too, enjoyed a grave and a pocket full 
of miseries to nibble upon. 

In his discourse of Friendship, Thorfeau starts 
with the idea of '' underpropping his love by such 
pure hate, that it would end in sympathy," like 
sweet butter from sour cream. And in this : — 

" Two solitary stars, — 
Unmeasured systems far 
Between us roll ; " 

getting off into the agonies of space, where every 
thing freezes, yet adds as inducement,- — 



220 THOREAU, 

" But by our conscious light we are 
Determined to one pole/' 

In other words, there was a pole apiece. He con- 
tinues the antithesis, and says there is " no more use 
in friendship than in the tints of flowers" (the 
chief use in them), " pathless the gulf of feeling 
yawns," and the reader yawns, too, at the idea of 
tumbhng into it. And so he " packs up in his 
mind all the clothes which outward nature wears," 
like a young lady's trunk going to Mount Desert. 
We must not expect literature, in each case, to 
run its hands round the dial-plate of style with 
cuckoo repetition : the snarls he criticises De Quin- 
cey for not getting into are the places where his 
bundles of sweetmeats untie. As in the Vendidad, 
" Hail to thee, O man ! who art come from the 
transitory place to the imperishable : " — 

" In Nature's nothing, be not nature's toy." 

This feature in his style is by no means so much 
bestowed upon his prose as his poetry. In his 
yerse he more than once attained to beauty, more 
often to quaintness. He did not court admiration, 
though he admired fame ; and he might have said : 

" Whoe'er thou beest who read'st this sullen writ, 
Which just so much courts thee as thou dost it." 

He had an excellent turn of illustration. Speak- 
ing of the debris of Carnac, he says ; — 



HIS WRITINGS. 221 

" Erect ourselves, and let those columns lie ; 
If Carnac's columns still stand on the plain, 
To enjoy our opportunities they remain." 

The little Yankee squatting on Walden Pond 
was not deceived by an Egyptian stone post, or 
sand heap. In another verse : — 

" When life contracts into a vulgar span, 
And human nature tires to be a man, — 
Greece ! who am I that should remember thee ? " 

And he let Greece slide. At times he hangs up old 
authors, in the blaze of a New England noon. 

" Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too, 
Our Shakespeare's life was rich to live again ; 
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true. 
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men." 

" Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour. 
For now I've business with this drop of dew." 

He could drop Shakespeare ; and it were well if 
both he and Dante were prescribed, rather than 
poured out of bath-tubs. Every one must, how- 
ever, admire the essay of Mr. Brown on the Bard 
of Avon, and the translation of Dante by Mr. 
Black : neatness is the elegance of poverty. 

The following verses are pretty, the last line 
from Milton's " Penseroso," with the change of a 
syllable. He did not fear to collect a good line any 
more than a good flower : — 



222 TEOBEAU. 

KtJMOES FROM AIJ^ JEOLIAN HAEP. 

" There is a vale which, none hath seen, 
Where foot of man has never been, 
Such as here lives with toil and strife, 
An anxious and a sinful life. 

There every virtue has its birth. 
Ere it descends upon the earth, 
And thither every deed returns, 
Which in the generous bosom burns. 

There love is warm, and youth is young, 
And poetry is yet unsung ; 
For Virtue still adventures there. 
And freely breathes her native air. 

And ever, if you hearken well. 
You still may hear its vesper bell, 
And tread of high-souled men go by. 
Their thoughts conversing with the sky." 

He bas no killing single shots, — his thoughts 
flowed. 

" Be not the fowler's net. 
Which stays my flight, 
And craftily is set 
T' allure my sight. 

But be the favoring gale 

That bears me on, 
And still doth fill my sail 

When thou art gone. 



EIS WRITINGS. 223 

Some tender buds were left upon my stem 
In mimicry of life. 

Some tumultuous little rill, 
Purling round its storied pebble. 

Conscience is instinct bred in the house. 

Experienced river ! 

Hast thou flowed for ever ? " 



As an instance of his humor in verse : — 

" I make ye an ofier, 
Ye gods, hear the scoffer ! 
The scheme will not hurt you, 
If ye will find goodness, I will find virtue. 
I have pride still unbended. 
And blood undescended ; 
I cannot toil bUndly, 
Though ye behave kindly, 
And I swear by the rood 
I '11 be slave to no god." 

" Nature doth have her dawn each day,- 
But mine are far between ; 
Content, I cry, for sooth to say, 
Mine brightest are I ween. 

For when my sun doth deign to rise, 

Though it be her noontide. 
Her fiiirest field in shadow lies, 

Nor can my light abide. 



224 TEOEEAU. 

Through his discourse I climb and see, 

As from some eastern hill, 
A brighter morrow rise to me 

Than lieth in her skill. 

As 'twere two summer days in one, 

Two Sundays come together. 
Our rays united make one sun, 

With fairest summer weather." 

July 25th, 1839. 

This date is for those who, unlike Alfieri, are by 
nature not almost destitute of curiosity; and the 
subject, Friendship, is for the like : — 

" For things that pass are past, and in this field 
The indeficient spring no winter flaws." 

What subtlety and what greatness in those quar- 
trains I then how truly original, how vague ! His 
Pandora's box of a head carried all manner of 
sweets. No one would guess the theme, Yankee 
though he be. He has that richness : — 

" Looks as it is with some true April day, 
Whose various weather strews the world with flowers." 

As he well af&rms, if it be applied antithetically, 
a man cannot wheedle nor overawe his genius. 
Nothing was ever so unfamiliar and startling to a 
man as his own thoughts. To the rarest genius 
it is the most expensive to succumb and conform 
to the ways of the world. It is the worst of 
lumber if the poet wants to float upon the breeze 



EIS WHITINGS. 225 

of popularity. The bird of paradise is obliged 
constantly to fly against the wind. The poet is 
no tender slip of fairy stock, but the toughest son 
of earth and of heaven. He will prevail to be 
popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his 
beauties too. He makes us free of his hearth and 
heart, which is greater than to offer us the free- 
dom of a city. Orpheus does not hear the strains 
which issue from his lyre, but only those which are 
breathed into it. The poet will write for his peers 
alone. He never whispers in a private ear. The 
true poem is not that which the public read. His 
true work will not stand in any prince's gallery. 

" My life has been the poem I would have writ, 
But I could not both live and utter it. 

I hearing get, who had but ears, 

And sight, who had but eyes before. 

I moments live, who lived but years, 

And truth discern, who knew but learning's lore." 

He has this bit of modesty : — 



" In vain I see the morning rise, 

In vain observe the western blaze, 
Who idly look to other skies, 
Expecting life by other ways. 

Amidst such boundless wealth without, 
I only still am poor within, 
10* o 



226 THOREAU. 

The birds have sung their sunimer out, 
But still my spring does not begin. 

Shall I then wait the autumn wind, 
Compelled to seek a milder day, 

And leave no curious nest behind, 
No woods still echoing to my lay." 

Again he asks, " Shall I not have words as fresh 
as my thought ? Shall I use any other man's word ? 
A genuine thought or feeling would find expres- 
sion for itself, if it had to invent hieroglyphics. 
I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not 
foresee into what company they were to fall. To 
say that God has given a man many and great 
talents, frequently means that he has brought his 
heavens down within reach of his hands." He 
sometimes twanged a tune of true prose on the 
strings of his theorbo, as where, instead of Cow- 
per's church-going bell, he flatly says : — 

'•'Dong sounds the brass in the east," 

which will pass for impudence with our United 
Brethren. It is difficult to comprehend his aloof- 
ness from these affectionate old symbols, drawling 
out from the sunshiny past, and without which our 
New England paradise is but a " howling wilder- 
ness," although he loves the echo of the meeting- 
house brass. It is his species of paradoxical 
quintessence. He draws a village : " it has a meet- 



ms WRITINGS. 227 

ing-house and horse-sheds, a tavern and a black- 
smith's shop for centre, and a good deal of wood 
to cut and cord yet." 

" A man that looks on glass. 
On it may stay his eye ; 
Or, if he pleaseth, tlirough it pass, 
And the heavens espy." 

His notions of institutions were like his views of 
sepulchres. Another has said, " It is my business 
to rot dead leaves," symbolizing a character work- 
ing like water. " A man might well pray that he 
may not taboo or curse any portion of nature by 
being buried in it. It is, therefore, much to the 
credit of Little John, the famous follower of Robin 
Hood, that his grave was ' long celebrous for the 
yielding of excellent whetstones.' Nothing but 
great antiquity can make grave-yards interesting 
to me. I have no friends there. The farmer who 
has skimmed his farm might perchance leave his 
body to nature to be ploughed in. ' And the king 
seide. What is the biriel which I se ? And the 
citeseynes of that cite answeride to him. It is the 
sepulchre of the man of God that cam fro Juda.' " 
He makes us a photograph of style, wliich touches 
some of his chief strength. " There is a sort of 
homely truth and naturalness in some books which 
is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. 
Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as 
in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is 



228 THOSE AU. 

next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have 
this merit only. Very few men can speak of 
Nature, for instance, with any truth. They over- 
step her modesty, somehow or other, and confer no 
favor. They do not speak a good word for her. 
The surhness Avith which the wood-chopper speaks 
of his woods, handhng them as indifferently as his 
axe, is better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm 
of the lover of nature." So Philina cried, " Oh I 
that I might never hear more of nature and scenes 
of nature I When the day is bright you go to 
walk, and to dance when you hear a tune played. 
But who would think a moment on the music or 
the weather ? It is the dancer that interests us, 
and not the violin; and to look upon a pair of 
bright black eyes is the life of a pair of blue ones. 
But what on earth have we to do with wells and 
brooks and old rotten lindens ? 

" I sing but as the linnet sings, 

That on the green bough dwelleth; 
A rich reward his music brings, 

As from his throat it swelleth : 
Yet might I ask, I 'd ask of thine 
One sparkling draught of purest wine, 
To drink it here before you." 

He viewed the wine, he quaffed it up : 
" Oh ! draught of sweetest savor ! 

Oh ! happ3^ house, where such a cup 
Is thought a little favor ! 



EIS WRITINGS. 229 

If well you fare, remember me, 
And thank kind Heaven, from envy free, 
As now for this I thank you." 

Goethe never signed tlie temperance-pledge : no 
more did Thoreau, but he drank the kind of wine 
" which never grew in the belly of the grape," but in 
that of the corn. He w^as made more dry by drink- 
ing. These affections were a kind of resume, or in- 
fant thanatopsis, sharp on both edges. Yet, in spite 
of this abundant moderation, he says, " I trust that 
you realize w^hat an exaggerator I am, — that I lay 
myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an oppor- 
tunity, —pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach heaven so. 
Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the 
witness stand. I will come as near to lying as you 
will drive a coach-and-four. If it isn't thus and 
so with me, it is with something." As for writing 
letters, he mounts above prose. " Methinks I will 
write to you. Methinks you will be glad to hear. 
We will stand on solid foundations to one another, 
— I am a column planted on this shore, you on 
that. We meet the same sun in his rising. We 
were built slowly, and have come to our bearing. 
We will not mutually fall over that we may meet, 
but will grandly and eternally guard the straits." 

" My life is like a stroll upon the beach, — 
I have but few companions by the shore. 



230 THOSE AU. 

Go where he will, the wise man is at home ; 
His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome ; 
Where his clear spirit leads him, there 's his road/' 

The well-known speech to his large and respect- 
able circle of acquaintance beyond the mountains is 
a pretty night-piece. '* Greeting : My most serene 
and irresponsible neighbors, let us see that we have 
the whole advantage of each other. We will be 
useful, at least, if not admirable to one another. 
I know that the mountains which separate us are 
high, and covered with perpetual snow ; but despair 
not. Improve the serene weather to scale them. 
If need be, soften the rocks with vinegar. For here 
lies the verdant plain of Italy ready to receive you. 
Nor shall I be slow on my side to penetrate to 
your Provence. Strike then boldly at head or 
heart, or any vital part. Depend upon it the timber 
is well seasoned and tough, and will bear rough 
usage ; and if it should crack, there is plenty more 
where it came from. I am no piece of crockery, 
that cannot be jostled against my neighbor without 
being in danger of being broken by the collision, 
and must needs ring false and jarringly to the end 
of my days when once I am cracked, but rather 
one of the old-fashioned wooden trenchers, which 
one while stands at the head of the table, and at 
another is a milking-stool, and at another a seat 
for children ; and, finally, goes down to its grave 



ms WRITINGS. 231 

not unadorned with honorable scars, and does not 
die till it is worn out. Nothing can shock a brave 
man but dulness. Think how many rebuffs every 
man has experienced in his day, — perhaps has 
fallen into a horse-pond, eaten fresh-water clams, 
or worn one shirt for a week without washing. 
Indeed, j^ou cannot receive a shock, unless you have 
an electric affinity for that which shocks you. Use 
me, then ; for I am useful in my way, and stand as 
one of many petitioners, — from toadstool and hen- 
bane up to dahlia and violet, — supplicating to be 
put to any use, if by any means you may find me 
serviceable : whether for a medicated drink or bath, 
as balm and lavender ; or for fragrance, as ver- 
bena and geranium ; or for sight, as cactus ; or for 
thoughts, as pansy. These humbler, at least, if not 
those higher uses." So good a writer should 

" live 
Upon tlie alms of his superfluous praise." 

He was choice in his words. " All these sounds," 
says he, ^' the crowing of cocks, the baying of 
dogs, and the hum of insects at noon, are the evi- 
dence of nature's health or sound state." For so 
learned a man he spared his erudition ; neither did 
he, as one who was no mean poet, use lines like 
these to celebrate his clearness : — 

" Who (hires uphraid these open rhymes of mine 
With blindfold Aquines, or darke Venusine ? 



232 THOREAU. 

Or rough-hewn Teretisius, writ in th' antique vain 

Like an old satire, and new Flaccian ? 

Which who reads thrice, and rubs his ragged brow, 

And deep indenteth every doubtful row, 

Scoring the margent with his blazing stars. 

And hundredth crooked interlinears 

(Like to a merchant's debt-roll new defaced, 

When some crack'd Manour cross'd his book at last), 

Should all in rage the curse-beat page out-rive, 

And in each dust-heap bury me alive." 

There are so few obscurities in Thoreau's writ- 
ing, that the uneasy malevolence of ephemeral 
critics has not discovered enough to cite, and his 
style has that ease and moderateness he appears to 
taste. 

He had the sense of humor, and in one place 
indulges himself in some Latin fun, where he names 
the wild ajDples, creatures of his fancy. " There 
is, first of all, the wood-apple, Malus sylvatica; 
the blue-jay apple ; the apple which grows in dells 
in the woods, sylvestrivallis ; also in hollows in 
pastures, camp e sir iv allis ; the apple that grows 
in an old cellar-hole, Malus cellaris ; the meadow- 
apple ; the partridge-apple ; the truants' apple, ces- 
s at or is ; the saunterer's apple, — you most lose 
yourself before you can find the way to that ; the 
beauty of the air, deeus aeris ; December-eating ; the 
frozen-thawed, gelato-soluta ; the brindled apple ; 
wine of New England ; the chickaree apple ; the 
green apple, — this has many synonymes ; in its 



EIS WRITINGS. 233 

perfect state it is the Cholera morhifera aut dysente- 
rifera^ pueruUs dilectissima ; the hedge-apple, Ma- 
ins sepium ; the slug apple, limacea ; the apple 
whose fruit we tasted in our youth ; our particular 
apple, not to be found in any catalogue, pedestrium 
solatium^^^ and many others. His love of this sour 
vegetable is characteristic : it is the wild flavor, 
the acidity, the difficulty of eating it, which pleased. 
To no gastronomic societies Thoreau appertained, 
unless drawn there by the butt. The lover of gravy, 
the justice lined with capon, apoplectic professors 
in purple skulls who reckon water a nuisance, 
never loved his pen that praised poverty : " Quid 
est paupertas ? odibile bonum, sanitatis mater, 
curarum remotio, absque sollicitudine semita, sa- 
pientiee reparatrix, negotium sine damno, intracta- 
bilis substantia, possessio absque calumnia, incerta 
fortuna, sine sollicitudine felicitas." * 

Or in what he names complemental verses : — • 

" Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch. 
To claim a station in the firmament, 
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub. 
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue, 
Witli roots and pot-herbs. We, more high, advance 
Such virtues only as admit excess, — 
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence 

* A free rendition : " What is poverty 1 Kerosene lamps, tak- 
ing tea out, Dalley's pain-killer, horse-cars, scolding help, book- 
seller's accounts, modern rubber boots, what nobody discounts, the 
next tax-bill, sitting in your minister's pew." 



234 THOREAU. 

All-seeing prudence, magnanimity 

That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue 

For whicli antiquity hath left no name, 

But patterns only, such as Hercules, 

Achilles, Theseus ; — back to thy loath'd cell ! " 

He had that pleasant art of convertibility, by 
which he could render the homely strains of Nature 
into homely verse and prose, holding yet the flavor 
of their immortal origins ; while meagre and barren 
writers upon science do perhaps intend to describe 
that quick being of which they prose, yet never 
loose a word of happiness or humor. The art of 
describing realities, and imparting to them a touch 
of human nature, is something comfortable. A 
few bits of such natural history as this follow : — 

" A hornets'-nest I discovered in a rather tall 
huckleberry-bush, the stem projecting through it, 
the leaves spreading over it. How these fellows 
avail themselves of these vegetables ! They kept 
arriving, the great fellows (with wliite abdomens), 
but I never saw whence they came, but only heard 
the buzz just at the entrance. At length, after I 
had stood before the nest for five minutes, during 
which tune they had taken no notice of me, two 
seemed to be consulting at the entrance, and then 
made a threatening dash at me, and returned to the 
nest. I took the hint and retired. They spoke as 
plainly as man could have done. I examined this 
nest again : I found no hornets buzzing about ; the 



HIS WRITINGS. 235 

entrance seemed to have been enlarged, so I con- 
cluded it had been deserted, but looking nearer I 
discovered two or three dead hornets, men-of-war, 
in the entry-way. Cutting off the bushes which 
sustained it, I proceeded to open it with my knife. 
It was an inverted cone, eight or nine inches by 
seven or eight. First, there were half-a-dozen lay- 
ers of waved, brownish paper resting loosely over 
one another, occupying nearly an inch in thickness, 
for a covering. Within were the six-sided cells, in 
three stories, suspended from the roof and from one 
another by one or two suspension-rods only; the 
lower story much smaller than the rest. And in 
what may be called the attic or garret of the struct- 
ure were two live hornets partially benumbed 
with cold. It was hke a deserted castle of the 
Mohawks, a few dead ones at the entrance to the 
fortress. The prinos berries (^Prinos verticillatus') 
are quite red ; the dogwood has lost every leaf, its 
bunches of dry, greenish berries hanging straight 
down from the bare stout twigs, as if their pedun- 
cles were broken. It has assumed its winter as- 
pect, — a Mithridatic look. The black birch (^Betula 
lento) is straw-colored, the witch-hazel (^Ramamelis 
Virginica) is now in bloom. I perceive the fra- 
grance of ripe grapes in the air. The little conical 
burrs of the agrimony stick to my clothes ; the pale 
lobelia still blooms freshly,* and the rough hawk- 



236 TffOREAU. 

weed holds up its globes of yellowish fuzzy seeds, 
as well as the panicled. The declining sun falling 
on the willows and on the water produces a rare, 
soft light I do not often see, — a greenish-yellow. 

" Thus, perchance, the Indian hunter, 
Many a Lagging year agone, 
Ghding o'er thy ripphng waters. 
Lowly hummed a natural song. 

" Now the sun 's behind the willows, 
Now he gleams along the waves. 
Faintly o'er the wearied billows 
Come the spirits of the braves. 

'' The reach of the river between Bedford and 
Carlisle, seen from a distance, has a strangely ethe- 
real, celestial, or elysian look. It is of a light sky- 
blue, alternating with smoother white streaks, where 
the surface reflects the light differently, like a milk- 
pan full of the milk of Valhalla partially skimmed, 
more gloriously and heavenly fair and pure than 
the sky itself. We have names for the rivers of 
hell, but none for the rivers of heaven, unless the 
Milky Way may be one. It is such a smooth and 
shining blue, like a panoply of sky-blue plates, — 

' Sug'ring all dangers with success.' 

" Fairhaven pond, seen from the cliffs in the 
moonlight, is a sheeny lake of apparently a bound- 
less primitive forest, untrodden by man ; the windy 



mS WRITINGS, 237 

surf sounding freshly and wildly in the single 
pine behind you, the silence of hushed wolves in 
the wilderness, and, as you fancy, moose looking 
off from the shores of the lake ; the stars of poe- 
try and history and unexplored nature looking 
down on the scene. This light and this hour 
takes the civilization all out of the landscape. 
Even at this time in the evening (8 p.m.) the 
crickets chirp and the small birds peep, the wind 
roars in the wood, as if it were just before dawn. 
The landscape is flattened into mere light and 
shade, from the least elevation. A field of ripen- 
ing corn, now at night, that has been topped, with 
the stalks stacked up, has an inexpressibly dry, 
sweet, rich ripening scent : I feel as I were an ear 
of ripening corn myself. Is not the whole air a 
compound of such odors indistinguishable ? drying 
corn-stalks in a field, what an herb garden ! What 
if one moon has come and gone with its world of 
poetry, so divine a creature freighted with its hints 
for me, and I not use them." 

He loved the 7tolvq:}.oia^o(.o daldaar^g, the noisy sea, 
and has left a pleasant sketch of his walks along the 
beach ; but he never attempted the ocean passage. 
The shore at Truro, on Cape Cod, which he at one 
time frequented, has been thus in part described. 

A Uttle Hamlet hid away from men, 
Spoil for no painter's eye, no poet's pen, 



238 THOBEAU. 

Modest as some brief flower, concealed, obscure, 
It nestles on the high and echoing shore ; 
Yet here I found I was a welcome guest, 
At generous Nature's hospitable feast. 
The barren moors no fences girdled high, 
The endless beaches planting could defy. 
And the blue sea admitted all the air, 
A cordial draught, so sparkling and so rare. 

The aged widow in her cottage lone. 

Of solitude and musing patient grown, 

Could let me wander o'er her scanty fields. 

And pick the flower that contemplation yields. 

This vision past, and all the rest was mine, — 

The gliding vessel on the ocean's line. 

That left the world wherein my senses strayed, 

Yet long enough her soft good-by delayed 

To let my eye engross her beauty rare, 

Kissed by the seas, an infant of the air. 

Thou, too, wert mine, the green and curling wave, 

Child of the sand, a playful child and brave ; 

Urged on the gale, the crashing surges fall; 

The zephyr breathes, how softly dances all ! 

Dread ocean- wave ! some eyes look out o'er thee 
And fill with tears, and ask. Could such things be ? 
Why slept the All-seeing Heart when death was near? 
Be hushed each doubt, assuage thy throbbing fear! 
Think One who made the sea and made the wind 
Might also feel for our lost human kind ; 
And they who sleep amid the surges tall 
Summoned great Nature to their funeral. 



HIS WRITINGS, 239 

And she obeyed. We fall not far from shore ; 
The sea-bird's wail, the surf, our loss deplore; 
The melancholy main goes sounding on 
His world-old anthem o'er our horizon. 

As Turner was in the habit of adding what he 
thought explanatory verses to his landscapes, so it 
may be said of some books, besides the special sub- 
ject treated they are diversified with quotations. 
Thoreau adhered closely to his topic, yet in his 
" Week" as many as a hundred authors are quoted, 
and there are more than three hundred passages 
either cited or touched upon. In fact, there are some 
works that have rather a peculiar value for literary 
gentry, like Pliny, Montaigne, and Burton's Anat- 
omy of Melancholy, upon which last work it was 
the opinion of Lord Byron many authors had con- 
structed a reputation. 

A list follows of the writings of Thoreau, as 

they appeared chronologically. These have been 

since printed in separate volumes, if they did not 

so appear at first (with few exceptions), under the 

titles of " Excursions, 1868," " The Maine Woods, 

1864," ^' A Yankee in Canada, 1866," '' Cape Cod, 

1865," and in addition a volume of letters, 1865. 

These works were printed in Boston : — 

• 
A Walk to Waciiusett. — In the " Boston Miscellany." 

In thk Dial. — 1840-1844: — 

Vol. I. — Sympathy. Aulus Persius Flaccus. Nature doth 

have her dawn each day. 



240 TEOREAU. 

Vol. TL — Sic Vita. Friendslii'p. 

Vol. III. — Natural History of Massachusetts. In " Prayers," 
the passage beginning " Great God." The Black Knight. 
The Inward Morning. Free Love. The Poet's Delay. 
Rumors from an ^Eolian Harp. The Moon. To the 
Maiden in the East. The Summer Rain. The Laws of 
Menu. Prometheus Bound. Anacreon. To a Stray 
Fowl. Orphics. Dark Ages. 
Vol. IV. — A Winter Walk. Homer, Ossian, Chaucer. 
Pindar. Fragments of Pindar. Herald of Freedom. 

In the Democratic Rf:view, 1843. — The Landlord. Para- 
dise (to be) Regained. 

In Graham's Magazine, 1847. — Thomas Carlyle and his 
Works. 

In the Union Magazine. — Ktaadn and the Maine Woods. 

In -S^sthetic Papers. — Resistance to Civil Government. 

A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. Bos- 
ton : James Monroe and Company, 1849. 

In Putnam's Magazine. — Excursion to Canada (in part). 
Cape Cod (in part). 

Walden. Boston : Ticknor and Company, 1854. 

In the Liberator. — Speech at Framingham, July 4th, 1854. 
Reminiscences of John Brown (read at North Elba, 
July 4th, 1860). 

In "Echoes from Harper's Ferry." — 1860. Lecture on 
John Brown, and Remarks at Concord on the day of his 
execution. 

In the Atlantic Monthly, 1 859. — Chesuncook, 1862. 
Walking. Autumnal Tints. Wild Apples. 

In the N. Y. Tribune. — The Succession of Forest Ti-ees 
(also printed in the Middlesex Agricultural Transactions). 
1860. 

'' Nihil mihi rescribas, attamen ipse veni.^' 



PERSONALITIES. 241 



CHAPTER XIII. 

PEESONALITIES. 

** If great men -wrong me, I will spare myself; 
If mean, I will spare tliem." — Donne. 

"As soon as generals are dismembered and distributed into parts, they 
become so much attenuated as in a manner to disappear; wherefore the 
terms by which they are expressed undergo the same attenuation, and 
seem to vanish and fail." — Swedenborg. 

" The art of overturning states is to discredit established customs, by look- 
ing into their origin, and pointing out that it was defective in authority and 
justice." — PASCAii. 

" Adspice murorum moles, prsernptque saxa, 
Obrutaque horrenti vasta theatra situ, 
Haec sunt Koma. Viden' velut ipsa cadaver a tantae 
Urbis adhuc Spirent imperiosa minas." — Janus Vitalis. 

/^UR author's life can be divided in three parts: 
^"^^ first, to the year 1837, when he left college ; 
next, to the publishing of his "Week," in 1849 
(ten years after his excursion up the Merrimac 
River, of which that work treats) ; and the remain- 
der of his doings makes the third. It was after he 
had graduated from Alma Mater that he began to 
embalm his thoughts in a diary, and not till many 
years' practice did they assume a systematic shape. 
This same year (1837) brought him into relation 
11 p 



242 THOEEAU. 

with a literary man, by wliich his mind may have 
been first soberly impregnated with that love of 
letters that after accompanied him, but of whom 
he was no servile copyist. He had so wisely been 
nourished at the collegiate fount as to come forth 
undissipated ; not digging his grave in tobacco and 
coffee, — those two perfect causes of paralysis. 
"I have a faint recollection of pleasure derived 
from smoking dried lily-stems before I was a man. 
I have never smoked any thing more noxious." 
His school-keeping was a nominal occupancy of his 
time for a couple of years ; and he soon began to 
serve the mistress to whom he was afterward 
bound, and to sing the immunity of Pan. Some 
long-anticipated excursion set the date upon the 
year, and furnished its materials for the journal. 
And at length, in 1842, he printed in a fabulous 
quarterly, "The Dial," a paper; and again, in 
1843, came out "The Walk to Wachusett," a 
bracing revival of exhilarating thoughts caught 
from the mountain atmosphere. In this same 
came the poems before commented upon, and it 
afforded him sufficient space to record his pious 
hopes and sing the .glories of the world he habit- 
ually admired. With the actual publication of the 
"Week," at his own expense, and which cost him 
his labor for several years to defray, begins a new 
era, — he is introduced to a larger circle and 



PERSONALITIES. 243 

launches forth his paper nautilus, well pleased to 
eye its thin and many-colored ribs shining in the 
watery sunshine. His early friends and readers 
never failed, and others increased ; thus was he 
rising in hterary fame, — 

" That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along." 

Then came the log-book of his woodland cruise at 
Walden, his critical articles upon Thomas Carlyle 
and others ; and he began to appear as a lecturer, 
with a theory, as near as he could have one. He 
was not to try to suit his audience, but consult 
the prompting of his genius and suit himself. If a 
demand was made for a lecture, he would gratify 
it so far as in him lay, but he could not descend 
from the poetry of insight to the incubation of 
prose. Lecture committees at times failed to see 
the prophetic god, and also the statute-putty. 
" Walden " increased his repute as a writer, if 
some great men thought him bean-dieted, with an 
owl for his minister, and who milked creation, not 
the cow. It is in vain for the angels to contend 
against stupidity. 

He began to take more part in affairs, the Anti 
slavery crisis coming to the boil in 1857. Captain 
John Brown, after of Harper's Ferrj-, was in Con- 
cord that year, and had talk with Thoreau, who 
knew nothing of his revolutionary plans. He shot 



244 THOREAU. 

off plenty of coruscating abolition rockets at Fra- 
mingham and elsewhere, and took his chance in 
preaching at those aniraated free-churches which 
pushed from the rotting compost of the Southern 
hot-bed. At Worcester he is said to have read 
a damaging-institution lecture upon " Beans," that 
has never got to print. He carried more guns at 
these irritable reform meetings, which served as 
a discharge-pipe for the virus of all the regular 
scolds, as he did not spatter by the job. At the 
time of Sims's rendition he offered to his townsmen 
that the revolutionary monument should be thickly 
coated with* black paint as a symbol of that dismal 
treason. He, too, had the glory of speaking the 
first public good word for Captain John Brown 
after his attack upon the beast run for the Amer- 
ican plate, — that Moloch entered by Jeff. Davis 
and backers. In three years more the United 
States, that killed instead of protecting bold Ossa- 
watomie, was enlistmg North Carolina slaves to 
fight against Virginia slaveholders. 

It must be considered the superior and divine 
event of his human experience when that famed 
hero of hberty forced the serpent of slavery 
from its death-grasp on the American Constitution. 
John Brown " expected to endure hardness ; " and 
this was the expectation and fruition of Thoreau, 
naturally and by his culture. His was a more sour 



PERSONALITIES. 245 

and saturnine hatred of injustice, his life was more 
passive, and he lost the glory of action which fell 
to the lot of Brown. He had nought in his 
thoughts of which a plot could spin ; neither did he 
believe in civil government, or that form of police 
against the Catiline or Caesar who has ready a 
coup d'etat^ such as the speckled Napoleonic ^gg^ 
now addled, that was laid in Paris. Thoreau 
worshipped a hero in a mortal disguise, under the 
shape of that homely son of justice : his pulses 
thrilled and his hands involuntarily clenched to- 
gether at the mention of Captain Brown, at whose 
funeral in Concord he said a few words, and pre- 
pared a version of Tacitus upon Agricola, some 
lines of which are furnished : — 

" You, Agricola, are fortunate, not only because 
your life was glorious, but because your death was 
timely. As they tell us who heard your last words, 
unchanged and willing you accepted your fate. 
.... Let us honor you by our admiration, rather 
than by short-lived praises ; and, if Nature aid us, 
by our emulation of you." He had before said: 
" When I now look over my common-place book of 
poetry, I find that the best of it is oftenest appli- 
cable, in part or wholhs to the case of Captain 
Brown. The sense of grand poetry, read by the 
light of this event, is brought out distinctly like 
an invisible writing held to the fire. As Mar veil 
wrote : — 



246 TEOBEAU, 

* When the sword glitters o'er the judge's head, 
And fear has coward churchmen silenced, 
Then is the poet's time ; 'tis then he draws, 
And single fights forsaken virtue's cause : 
Sings still of ancient rights and better times. 
Seeks suffering good, arraigns successful crimes/ 

" And George Chapman : — 

* There is no danger to a man who knows 
What life and death is ; there 's not any law 
Exceeds his knowledge.' 

" And Wotton : — 

* Who hath his life from rumors freed. 

Of hope to rise or fear to fall ; 
Lord of himself, though not of lands. 
And having nothing, yet hath all.'" 

The foundation of his well-chosen attainment in 
Modern and Classic authors dates from the origin 
of his literary life. In college he studied only 
what was best, and made it the rule. He could say 
to young students : " Begin with the best ! start 
with Avhat is so, never deviate." That part of 
American history he studied was pre-pilgrim : the 
Jesuit relations, early New England authors, Wood, 
Smith, or Josselyn, afforded him cordial entertain- 
ment. Henry's Travels, Lewis and Clark, and such 
books, he knew remarkably well, and thought no one 
had written better accounts of things and made them 
more living than Goethe in his letters from Italy. ■ 

Alpine and sea-side plants he admired, besides 



PERSONALITIES, 247 

those of his own village : of the latter, he mostly 
attended willows, -golden-rods, asters, polygonums, 
sedges, and grasses; fungi and lichens he some- 
what affected. He was accustomed to date the 
day of the month by the appearance of certain flow- 
ers, and thus visited special plants for a series of 
years, in order to form an average ; as his white- 
thorn by Tarbell's Spring, " good for to-morrow, if 
not for to-day." The bigness of noted trees, the 
number of rings, the degree of branching by which 
their age may be drawn, the larger forests, such as 
that princely "Inches Oak-wood '* in ^JVest Acton, 
or Wetherbee's patch, he paid attentions to. Here 
he made his cards, and left more than a pack ; his 
friends were surely disengaged, unless they had cut 
off. He could sink down in the specific history 
of a woodland by learning what trees now oc-. 
cupied the soil. In some seasons he bored a vari- 
ety of forest trees, when the sap was amiable, and 
made his black-birch and other light wines. He 
tucked plants away in his soft hat in place of a bot- 
any-box. His study (a place in the garret) held its 
dry miscellany of botanical specimens ; its corner of 
canes, its cases of eggs and lichens, and a weight 
of Indian arrow-heads and hatchets, besides a store 
of nuts, of which he was as fond as squirrels. 
'•' Man comes out of his winter quarters in March 
as lean as a woodchuck." 



248 THOREAU. 

In the yarieties of tracks he was a philologist, 
and read that primeval language, and studied the 
snow for them, as well as for its wonderful blue 
and pink colors, and its floccular deposits as it 
melts. He saw that hunter's track who always steps 
hefore you come. Ice in all its lines and polish he 
peculiarly admired. From Billerica Falls to Saxon- 
ville ox-bow, thirty miles or more, he sounded the 
deeps and shallows of the Concord Riyer, and put 
down in his tablets that he had such a feeling. Gos- 
samer was a shifting problem, beautifully yague : — 

" A ceaseless glimmering near the ground betrays 
The gossamer, its tiny thread is waving past, 
Borne on the wind's faint breath, and to yon branch. 
Tangled and trembling, clings like snowy silk." 

Insects were fascinating, from the first gray little 
moth, the perla^ born in February's deceitful glare, 
and the " fuzzy gnats " that people the gay sun- 
beams, to the last luxuriating Vanessa antiope^ that 
gorgeous purple-yelyet butterfly somewhat wrecked 
amid November's champaign breakers. He sought 
for and had honey-bees in the close spathe of the 
marsh-cabbage, when the eye could detect no. open- 
ing of the same ; water-bugs, skaters, carrion 
beetles, devil 's-needles (" the French call them 
demoiselles^ the artist loves to paint them, and 
paint must be cheap") ; the sap-green, glittering, 
irridescent cicindelas, those lively darlings of New- 



PERSONALITIES. 249 

bury sandbanks and Professor Peck, he lingered 
over as heaven's never-to-be-repainted Golconda. 
Hornets, wasps, bees, and spiders, and their several 
nests, he carefully attended. The worms and cater- 
pillars, washed in the spring-freshets from the mead- 
ow-grass, filled his soul with hope at the profuse 
vermicular expansion of Nature. The somersaults of 
the caracoling stream were his vital pursuit, which, 
slow as it appears, now and then jumps up three feet 
in the sacred ash-barrel of the peaceful cellar. 
Hawks, ducks, sparrows, thrushes, and migrating 
warblers, in all their variety, he carefully perused 
with his field-glass, — an instrument purchased with 
toilsome discretion, and carried in its own strong 
case and pocket. Thoreau named all the birds 
without a gun, a weapon he never used in ma- 
ture years. He neither killed nor imprisoned any 
animal, unless driven by acute needs. He brought 
home a flying squirrel, to study its mode of flight, 
but quickly carried it back to the wood. 

He possessed true instincts of topography, and 
could conceal choice things in the brush and find 
them again, unlike Gall, who commonly lost his 
locality and himself, as he tells us, when in the 
wood, master as he was in playing on the organ. 
If he needed a box on his walk, he would strip a 
piece of birch-bark off the tree, fold it when cut 
straightly together, and put his tender lichen or 
11* 



250 THOREAU. 

brittle creature therein. In those irritable thunder- 
claps which come, he says, " with tender, graceful 
violence," he sometimes erected a transitory house 
by means of his pocket-knife, rapidly paring away 
the white-pine and oak, taking the lower limbs of 
a large tree and pitching on the cut brush for a roof. 
Here he sat, pleased with the minute drops from 
oft the eaves, not questioning the love of electric- 
ity for trees. If out on the river, haul up your 
boat, turn it upside-down, and yourself under it. 
Once he was thus doubled up, when Jove let drop 
a pattern thunderbolt in the river in front of his 
boat, while he whistled a lively air as accompani- 
ment. This is noted, as he was much distressed 
by storms when young, and used to go whining to 
his father's room, and say, " I don't feel well," 
and then take shelter in the paternal arms, when 
his health improved. 

" His little son into his bosora creeps, 
The lovely image of his father's face." 

While walking in the woods, he delighted to give 
the falhng leaves as much noise and rustle as he 
could, all the while singing some cheerful stave, 
thus celebrating the pedestrian's service to Pan as 
well as to the nymphs and dryads, who never Hve 
in a dumb asylum. 

" The squirrel chatters merrily, 
The nut falls ripe and brown. 



PEBSONALITIES. 251 

And, gem-like, from the jewelled tree 

The leaf comes fluttering down ; 
And, restless in his plumage gay, 
From bush to bush loud screams the jay." 

Nothing pleased him better than our native vin- 
tage days, when the border of the meadows be- 
comes a rich plantation, whose gathering has been 
described in the lines that follow : — 

WILD GRAPES. 

" Bring me some grapes," she cried, " some clusters 

bring, 
Herbert, with large flat leaves, the purple founts." 
Then answering he, — ^ " Ellen, if in the days 
When on the river's bank hang ripely o'er 
The tempting bunches red, and fragrance fills 
The clear September air, if then " — " Ah ! then, " 
Broke in the girl, — " then " — 

September coming, 
Herbert, the day of all those sun-spoiled days 
Quite petted by him most, wishing to choose, 
Alone set off for the familiar bank 
Of the blue river, nor to Ellen spake ; 
That thing of moods long since forgetting all 
Request or promise floating o'er the year. 
On his right arm a white ash basket swung, 
Its depth a promise of its coming stores ; 
While the fair boy, o'ertaking in his thought • 
Those tinted bubbles, the best lover's game. 
Sped joyous on through the clear mellowing day. 
At length he passed Fairhaven's cliff, whose front 



252 TEOBEAU. 

Shuts in this curve of shore, and soon he sees 
The harvest-laden vine. 

Large hopes were his, ' 

And with a bounding step he leaped along 
O'er the close cranberry-beds, his trusty foot 
Oft lighting on the high elastic tufts 
Of the promiscuous sedge. Alas, for hope, 
As some deliberate hand those vines had picked 
By most subtracting rule ! yet on the youth 
More eager sprang,, dreaming of jDrizes rare. 
To the blue river's floor fell the green marsh, 
And a white mountain cloud-range slowly touched 
The infinite zenith of September's heaven. 
" I have you now ! " cried Herbert, tearing through 
The envious thorny thicket to the vines. 
Crushing the alder sticks, where rustling leaves 
Conceal the rolling stones and wild-rose stems, 
And always in the cynic cat-briar pricked. 
" I have you now ! " 

And rarely on the scope 
Of bold adventurer, British or Spaniard, 
Loomed Indian coasts till then a poet's dream, 
More glad to them than this Etruscan vase 
On his rash eyes, reward of hope deferred. 
There swum before him in the magic veil 
Of that soft shimmering autumn afternoon, 
On the black speckled alders, on the ground, 
On leaf and pebble flat or round, the light 
Of purple grapes, purple or bloomed. 
And the few saintly bunches Muscat-white ! 



EBSONALITIES. 253 

Nor Herbert paused, nor looked at half his wealth, 

As in his wild delight he grasped a bunch. 

And till his lingers burst still grasped a bunch, 

Heaping the great ash basket till its cave 

No lurther globe could hold. And then he stopped, 

And from a shrivelled stub picked off three grapes, 

Those which he ate. 

'Tis right he wreathe about 
This heaped and purple spoil that he has robbed 
Those fresh unfrosted leaves green in the shade, 
And then he weighs upon his hand the prize 
And springs, — the Atlas on his nervous arm. 
Now buried 'neath the basket Herbert sunk, 
Or seemed, and showers of drops tickled his cheeks, 
Yet with inhuman nerve he struggles on. 
At times the boy, half fainting in his march, 
Saw twirl in coils the river at his feet, 
Reflecting madly the still woods and hills, 
The quiet cattle" painted on the pool 
In far-off pastures, and the musing clouds 
That scarcely sailed, or seemed to sail, at all. 
Till the strong shadows soothed the ruby trees 
To one autumnal black, how hot the toil, 
With glowing cheeks coursed by the exacted tide, 
Aching yet eager, resolute to win. 
Nor leave a berry though his shoulder snap. 

Within the well-known door his tribute placed, 
A fragrance of Italian vineyards leagued 
The dear New English farm-house with sweet shores 
In spicy archij^elagoes of gold. 



254 THOREAU. 

Where the sun cannot set, but fades to moonlight, 
And tall maids supjoort amphoras on their brows. 

And Ellen ran, all Hebe, down the stair 

Almost at one long step, and while the youth still stood, 

And wonder stricken how he reached that door, 

She cried, " Dear mother, fly and see this world of 

grapes." 
Then Herbert pufied two seconds, and went in. 

And much fresh enjoyment he would have felt 
in the observing wisdom of that admirably en- 
dowed flower- writer, Annie S. Downs, a child of 
Concord (the naturalist's heaven), full of useful 
knowledge, and with an out-of-doors heart like his ; 
a constant friend to flowers, ferns, and mosses, with 
an affectionate sympathy, and a taste fine and un- 
erring reflected by the exquisite beings she justly 
celebrates. Must she not possess apportion of the 
snowdrop's prophecy herself as to her writings and 
this world's winter ? when she says : — 

* The tender Snowdrop, erect and brave, 

Gayly sprang from her snow-strewn bed. 
She doiibted not there was sunshine warm 

To welcome her shrinking head ; 
The graceful curves of her slender stem. 

The sheen of her petals white, 
As looking across the bank of snow 

She shone like a gleam of light." 

Annie S. Downs and Alfred B. Street, native 
American writers in the original packages, not ex- 



PERSONALITIES. 255 

tended by the critics, — writers, under the provi- 
dence of God, to be a blessing to those who love 
His works, hke Thoreau ! 

On being asked of a future world and its rewards 
and punishments, by a bore, he said, " Those were 
voluntaries I did not take," and he did not bite at 
a clergyman's skilfully baited hook of immortality, 
of which he said could be no doubt. He spoke of the 
reserved meaning in the insect metamorphosis of the 
moth, painted like the summer sunrise, that makes 
its escape from a loathsome worm, and cheats the 
wintry shroud, its chrysalis. One sweet hour of 
spring, gazing into a grassy-bottomed pool, where 
the insect youth were disporting, the gyrince (boat 
flies) darting, and tadpoles beginning, like maga- 
zine writers, to drop their tails, he said : " Yes, 
I feel positive beyond a doubt, I must pass 
through all these conditions, one day and another ; 
I must go the whole round of life, and come full 
circle." 

If he had reason to borrow an axe or plane, his 
habit was to return it more sharply. In a walk, his 
companion, a citizen, said, " I do not see where you 
find your Indian arrowheads." Stooping to the 
ground, Henry picked one up, and presented it to 
him, crying, " Here is one." After reading and 
dreaming on the Truro shore about the deeds of Cap- 
tain Kidd 'and wrecks of old pirate ships, he walked 



256 THOREAU. 

out after dinner on tlie beach, and found a five-franc 
piece of old France, saying, " I thought it was a 
button, it was so black ; but it is coh-money " (the 
name given there to stolen treasure). He said of 
early New English writers, like old Josselyn, " They 
give you one piece of nature, at any rate, and that 
is themselves, smacking their lips like a coach- whip, 
— none of those emasculated modern histories, 
such as Prescott's, cursed with a style." 

" As dead low earth eclipses and controls 
The quick high moon, so doth the body souls." 

His titles, if given by himself, are descriptive 
enough. His " Week," with its chapters of days, 
is agglutinative, and chains the whole agreeably in 
one, — 

" Much like the corals which thy wrist enfold, 
Laced up together in congruity." 

"Autumnal Tints" and "Wild Apples" are 
fair country invitations to a hospitable house : the 
platter adapts itself to its red-cheeked shining fruit. 
In his volume called, without Ms sensitiveness, 
" Excursions," the contents look like essays, but are 
really descriptions drawn from his journals. Tho- 
reau, like some of his neighbors, could not mosaic 
an essay ; but he loved, like the steady shooting 
gossip, to tell a good story. He lacked the starch 
and buckram that vamps the Addison and Johnson 



PEBSONALITIES. 257 

mimes. His letters — of which more might have 
been printed — are abominably didactic, fitted to 
deepen the heroic drain. He wasted none of his 
precious jewels, his moments, upon epistles to 
the class of Rosa Matilda invalids, some of whom 
like leeches fastened upon his horny cuticle, but 
did not draw. Of this gilt vermoulu, the sugar- 
gingerbread of Sympathy, Hawthorne had as 
much. There was a blank simper, an insufficient 
sort of affliction, at your petted sorrow, in the story- 
teller, — more consoling than the boiled maccaroni 
of pathos. Hawthorne — swallowed up in the 
wretchedness of life, in that sardonic puritan ele- 
ment that drips from the " elms of his birthplace 
— thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one 
should notice man's miseries, these being his staple 
product. Thoreau looked upon it as equally non- 
sense, because men had no miseries at all except 
those of indigestion and laziness, manufactured to 
their own order. The writer of fiction could not 
read the naturalist probably ; and Thoreau had no 
more love or sympathy for fiction in books than in 
character. " Robinson Crusoe " and " Sandford and 
Merton," it is to be feared, were lost on him, such 
was his abhorrence of lies. Yet in the stoical /owe? 
of their characters they were alike ; and it is 
believed that Hawthorne truly admired Thoreau. 
A vein of humor had they both ; and when they 

Q 



258 THOREAU. 

laughed, like Shelley, the operation was sufficient 
to split a pitcher. Hawthorne could have said: 
" People live as long in Pepper Alley as on Salis- 
bury Plain ; and they live so much happier that an 
inhabitant of the first would, if he turned cottager, 
starve his understanding for want of conversation, 
and perish in a state of mental inferiority." Henry 
would never believe it. 

As the important consequence from his gradua- 
tion at Harvard, he urged upon that fading lumi- 
nary, Jared Sparks, the need he had of books in the 
library; and by badgering got them out. His per- 
sistence became traditional. His incarceration for 
one night in Concord jail, because he refused' the 
payment of his poll-tax, is described in his tract, 
" Civil Disobedience," in the volume, " A Yankee 
in Canada." In this is his signing-off ; " I, H. D. T., 
have signed off, and do not hold myself responsible 
to your multifarious, uncivil chaos, named Civil 
Government." He never went to nor voted at a 
town meeting, — the instrument for operating upon 
a New England village, — nor to "meeting" or 
church ; nor often did things he could not under- 
stand. In these respects Hawthorne mimicked 
him. The Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky 
character, with a soft rolhng gait. A wit said he 
seemed like a honed pirate. Shy and awkward, 
he dreaded the stranger in his gates ; while, as 



PERSONALITIES. • 259 

iDspector, he was employed to swear the oaths 
versus English colliers. When surveyor, finding 
rum sent to the African coast was watered, he 
vowed he would not ship another gill if it was any 
thing but pure proof spirit. Such was his justice 
to the oppressed. One of the things he most 
dreaded was to be looked at after he Was dead. 
Being at a friend's demise, of whose extinction he 
had the care, he enjoyed — as if it had been a 
scene in some old Spanish novel — his success in 
keeping the waiters from stealing the costly wines 
sent in for the sick. Careless of heat and cold in- 
doors, he lived in an JEolian-harp house, that could 
not be warmed: that he entered it by a trap-door 
from a rope-ladder is false. Lovely, amiable, and 
charming, his absent-mindedness passed for un- 
social when he was hatching a new tragedy. As a 
writer, he loves the morbid and the lame. The 
" Gentle Boy " and " Scarlet Letter " eloped with 
the girls' boarding-schools. His reputation is mas- 
ter of his literary taste. His characters are not 
drawn from life ; his plots and thoughts are often 
dreary, as he was himself in some lights. His favor- 
ite writers were " the English novelists," Boccaccio, 
Horace, and Johnson. 

A few lines have been given from some of Tho- 
reau's accepted authors : he loved Homer for his na- 
ture ; Virgil for his finish ; Chaucer for his health ; 



260 THOBEAU. 

the Robin Hood ballads for their out-door blooming 
life ; Ossian for his grandeur ; Persius for his crab- 
bed philosophy ; Milton for his neatness and swing. 
He never loved, nor did any thing but what was 
good, yet he sometimes got no bargain in buying 
books, as in " Wright's Provincial Dictionary ; " but 
he prized ^' Loudon's Arboretum," of which, after 
thinking of its purchase and saving up the money 
for years, he became a master. It was an affair 
with him to dispense his hardly earned pistareen. 
He lacked the suspicious generosity, the disguise 
of egoism: on him peeling or appealing were 
wasted ; he was as close to his aim as the bark on 
a tree. " Virtue is its own reward," " A fool 
and his money are soon parted." His property 
was packed like seeds in a sunflower. There was 
not much of it, but that remained. He had not 
the mirage of sympathies, such as Gorchakoff de- 
scribes as wasted upon bare Poles. He squeezed 
the sandbanks of the Marlboro' road with the soles 
of his feet to obtain relief for his head, but did 
not throw away upon unskilled idleness his wage 
of living. No one was freer of his means in what 
he thought a good cause. " His principal and 
primary business was to be a poet : he was a natural 
man without design, who spoke what he thought, 
and just as he thought it." Antiquities, Montfau- 
con, or Grose, bibliomania, trifles instead of value, 



PERSONALITIES. 261 

dead men's shoes or fancies, he lay not up. At 
Walden he flung out of the window his only orna- 
ment, — a paper weight, — because it needed dust- 
ing. At a city eating-house his usual order was 
" boiled apple" (a manual of alum with shortening), 
seduced by its title. He could spoil an hour and 
the shopman's patience in his search after a knife, 
never buying till he got the short, stout blade with 
the like handle. He tied his shoes in a hard lover's- 
knot, and was intensely nice in his personal, — 

"Life without thee is loose and spills." 

He faintly piqued his curiosity with pithy bon- 
mots, such as : " Cows in the pasture are good 
milkers. You cannot travel four roads at one 
time. If you wish the meat, crack the nut. If it 
does not happen soon, it will late. Take time as it 
comes, people for what they are worth, and money 
for what it buys. As the bill, so goes the song ; as 
the bird, such the nest. Time runs before men. 
A good dog never finds good bones. Cherries 
taste sour to single birds. No black milk, no white 
crows. Fold weather and false women are always 
expected. Occasion wears front-hair. No fish nor 
salt when a fool holds the line. A poor man's 
cow — a rich man's child — dies. Sleep is half a 
dinner. A wit sleeps in the middle of a narrow 
bed. Good heart, weak head. Cocks crow as for- 



262 THOREAU. 

tune brightens. A fool is always starting. At a 
small spring you can drink at your ease. Fire 
is like an old maid the best company. Long talk 
and little time. Better days, a bankrupt's pur- 
chase. What men do, not what they promise." 

" The poor man's childe invited was to dine, 
With flesh of oxen, sheep, and fatted swine, 
(Far better cheer than he at home could finde,) 
And yet this cliilde to stay had Uttle minde. 
You have, quoth he, no apple, froise, nor pie, 
Stew'd pears, with bread and milk and walnuts hj." 



FIELD SPORTS. 263 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FIELD SPORTS. 

"At length I hailed, him, seeing that his hat 
Was moist with water-drops, as if the brim 
Had newly scooped a running stream." — "WoBDS'WOETH. 

" I, to my soft still walk." — Doira^E. 

** Scire est nescire, nisi id me scire alius scierit." — LucrLlirs. 

" Unas homo, nullus homo." — Themistius. 

" What beauty would have lovely styled; 
What manners pretty, nature mild, 
What wonder perfect, all were fil'd 
Upon record in this blest child." — Ben Jonsoit. 

A S an honorary member, Thoreau appertained 
to the Boston Society of Natural History, 
adding to its reports, besides comparing notes with 
the care-takers or curators of the mise en scene. 
To this body he left his collections of plants, Indian 
tools, and the like. His latest traffic with it refers 
to the number of bars or fins upon a pike, which 
had more or less than was decent. He sat upon 
his eggs with theirs. His city visit was to their 
books, and there he made his call, not upon the 
swift ladies of Spruce Street ; and more than once 
he entered by the window before the janitor had 
digested his omelet, — 



264 THOREAU. 

"How kind is Heaven to men ! " 

When lie found a wonder, he sent it, as in the case 
of the ne plus ultra halls from Flint's Pond, in 
Lincoln, made of grass, reeds, and leaves, triturated 
by washing upon the sandy beach, and rolled into 
polished reddish globes, about the bigness of an 
orange. A new species of mouse, three Blanding 
cistudas, and several box-turtles (rare here) were 
amoDg his prizes. Of the Cistuda Blandingii^ the 
herpetologist Holbrook says that its sole locality 
is the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies, and the one 
he saw came from the Fox River. 

" Striving to save the whole, by parcells die." 

On the Andromeda Ponds, between Walden and 
Fairhaven, he found the red snow; for things 
tropic or polar can be found if looked for. " There 
is no power to see in the eye itself, any more than 
in any other jelly : we cannot see any thing till we 
are possessed with the idea of it. The sportsman 
had the meadow-hens half-way into his bag when 
he started, and has only to shove them down. 
First, the idea or image of a plant occupies my 
thoughts, and at length I surely see it, though it 
may seem as foreign to this locality as Hudson's Bay 
is." Thus he clutched the Labrador Ledum and 
Kalmia glauca. His docility was great, and as the 
newest botanies changed the name of Andromeda 



FIELD SPORTS. 265 

to Cassandra, he accepted it, and became an accom- 
plice to this tragic deed. Macbeth and Catiline 
are spared for the roses. His annual interest was 
paid, his banks did not fail ; the lampreys' nests on 
the river yet surviving, built of small stones and 
sometimes two feet high. It is of this petromyzon 
our fishermen have the funereal idea, as they are 
never seen coming back after going up stream, 
that they all die. The dead suckers seen floating 
in the river each spring inspired his muse. He 
admired the otters' tracks, the remains of their 
scaly dinners, and the places on the river where 
they amused themselves sliding like bo3^s. He had 
chased and caught woodchucks, but failed in this 
experiment on a fox ; and caught, instead of him, a 
bronchial cold that did him great harm. He was 
in the habit of examining the squirrels' nests in 
the trees : the gray makes his of leaves ; the red, 
of grass and fibres of bark. He has climbed suc- 
cessively four pines after hawks' nests, and was 
much stuck up ; and once he gathered the brilliant 
flowers of the white-pine from the very tops of the 
tallest pines, when he was pitched on the highest 
scale. By .such imprudent exertion, being strained, 
and that of wheeling heavy loads of driftwood, it 
was feared he impaired his health, always doing 
ideal work. Fishes' nests and spawn — more 
especially of the horn-pout and bream — were often 
12 



266 TEOREAU. 

studied ; and lie carried to the entomologist Harris 
the first lively snow-flea he enjoyed. 

" In earth's wide thoroughfare below, 
Two only men contented go, — 
Who knows what 's right and what 's forbid, 
And he from whom is knowledge hid." 

Turtles were his pride and consolation. He has 
piloted a snapping-turtle, Emysaurus serpentina^ to 
his house from the river, that could easily carry 
him on his back ; and would sometimes hatch a 
brood of these Herculean monsters in his yard. 
They waited for information, or listened to their 
instinct, before setting off for the water. " If 
Iliads are not composed in our day, snapping-turtle s 
are hatched and arrive at maturity. It already 
thrusts forth its tremendous head for the first time 
in this sphere, and slowly moves from side to side, 
opening its small glistening eyes for the first time 
to the light, expressive of dull rage as if it had 
endured the trials of this world for a century. 
They not only live after they are dead, but begin 
to live before they are alive. When I behold this 
monster thus steadily advancing to maturity, all 
nature abetting, I am convinced that there must 
be an n-resistible necessity for mud- turtles. With 
what unshaking tenacity Nature sticks to one idea. 
These eggs, not warm to the touch, buried in the 
ground, so slow to hatch, are like the seeds of 



FIELD SPORTS. 267 

vegetable life. I am affected by the thought that 
the earth nurses these eggs. They are planted in 
the earth, and the earth takes care of them ; she is 
genial to them, and does not kill them. This 
mother is not merely inanimate and inorganic. 
Though the immediate mother-turtle abandons her 
offspring, the earth and sun are kind to them. The 
old turtle, on which the earth rests, takes care of 
them, while the other waddles off. Earth was not 
made poisonous and deadly to them. The earth 
has some virtue in it : when seeds are put into it, 
they germinate ; when turtles' eggs, they hatch in 
due time. Though the mother- turtle remained and 
boarded them, it would still be the universal World- 
turtle which through her cared for them as now. 
Thus the earth is the maker of all creatures. 
Talk of Hercules, — his feats in the cradle ! what 
kind of nursery has this one had ? " 

" Life lock't in death, heav'n in a shell.'* 

The wood-tortoise, JEmys insculpta^ was another 
annual favorite. It is heard in early spring, after 
the mud from the freshets has dried on the fallen 
leaves in swamps that border the stream, slowly 
rustling the leaves in its cautious advances, and 
then mysteriously tumbling down the steep bank 
into the river, — a slightly startling operation. He 
patiently speculates upon its shingled, pectinately 



268 TEOREAU. 

engraved roof or back, and its perennial secrets 
in that indelible hierogram. The mud-turtle, he 
thought, only gained its peculiar odors after spring 
had come, like other flowers ; and alludes to the 
high-backed, elliptical shell of the stink-pot cov- 
ered with leeches. Of the trim painted tortoise he 
asks : " He who painted the tortoise thus, what 
were his designs? The gold-bead turtle glides 
anxiously amid the spreading calla-leaves near the 
warm depths of the black brook. I have seen 
signs of spring : I have seen a frog swiftly sinking 
in a pool, or where he dimpled the surface as he 
leapt in ; I have seen the brilliant spots of the tor- 
toises stirring at the bottom of ditches ; I have 
seen the clear sap trickling from the red maple. 
The first pleasant days of spring come out like a 
squirrel, and go in again. I do not know at first 
what charms me." 

THE COMING OF SPRING. 

With the red leaves its floor was carpeted, — 
Floor of that Forest-brook across whose weeds 
A trembling tree was thrown, — those leaves so red 
Shed from the grassy bank when Autumn bleeds 
In all the maples ; here the Spring first feeds 
Her pulsing heart with the specked turtle's gold, 
Half-seen emerging from the last year's reeds, — 
Spring that is joyous and grows never old, 
Soft in aerial hope, sweet yet controlled. 



FIELD SPORTS. 269 

Gently the blue-bird warbled his sad song, 
Shrill came the robin's whistle from the hill, 
The sparrows twittering all the hedge along. 
While darting trout clouded the reed-born rill, 
And generous elm-trees budded o'er the mill, 
Weaving a flower- wreath on the fragrant air;. 
And the soft-moving skies seemed never still. 
And all was calm with peace and void from care, 
Both heaven and earth, and life and all things there. 

The early willows launched their catkins forth 
To catch the first kind glances of the sun, 
Their larger brethren smiled with golden mirth, 
And alder tassels dropt, and birches spun 
Their glittering rings, and maple buds begun 
To cloud again their rubies down the glen. 
And diving ducks shook sparkling in the run, 
While in the old year's leaves the tiny wren 
Peeped at the tiny titmouse, come to life again. 

Frogs held bis contrite admiration. " The same 
starry geometry looks down on their active and 
their torpid state." The little peeping hyla winds 
bis shrill, mellov^^, miniature flageolet in the warm 
overflowed pools, and suggests to him this stupen- 
dous image : " It was like the light reflected from 
the mountain ridges, within the shaded portion of the 
moon, forerunner and herald of the spring." He 
made a regular business of studying frogs, — waded 
for them with freezing calves in the early freshet, 
caught them, and carried them home to hear their 



270 THOBEAU. 

sage songs. "I paddle up the river to see the 
moonlight and hear the bull-frog." He loved to 
be present at the instant when the springing grass 
at the bottoms of ditches lifts its spear above the 
surface and bathes in the spring air. " The grass- 
green tufts at the spring were like a green fire. 
Then the willow-catkins looked like small pearl 
buttons on a waistcoat. Then the bluebird is 
like a speck of clear blue skj seen near the end of 
a storm, reminding us of an ethereal region and a 
heaven which we had forgotten. With his warble 
he drills the ice, and his little rill of melody flows 
a short way down the concave of the sky. The 
sharp whistle of the blackbird, too, is heard, like 
single sparks, or a shower of them, shot up from 
the swamp, and seen against the dark winter in the 
rear. Here, again, in the flight of the goldfinch, 
in its ricochet motion, is that undulation observed 
in so many materials, as in the mackerel-sky." 
He doubts if the season will be long enough for 
such oriental and luxurious slowness as the croak- 
ing of the first wood-frog. Ah, how weatherwise 
he must be ! Now he loses sight completely of 
those November days, in which you must hold 
on to life by your teeth. About May 22d, he 
hears the willowy music of frogs, and notices 
the pads on the river, with often a scolloped edge 
like those tin platters on which country people 



FIELD SPORTS. 271 

sometimes bake turnovers. The earth is all fra- 
grant as one flower, and life perfectly fresh and 
uncankered. He says of the wood-frog, Bana syl- 
vatica : "It had four or five dusky bars, which 
matched exactly when the legs were folded, show- 
ing that the painter applied his brush to the 
animal when in that position." The leopard-frog, 
-the marsh-frog, the bull-frog, and that best of all 
earthly singers, the toad, he never could do enough 
for. It was, he says, a great discovery, when first 
he found the ineffable trilling concerto of early 
summer after sunset was arranged by the toads, — 
when the very earth seems to steam with the 
sound. He makes up his mind reluctantly, as if 
somebody had blundered about tlmt time. "It 
would seem then that snakes undertake to swallow 
toads that are too big for them. I saw a snake by 
the roadside, and touched him with my foot to see 
if he were dead. He had a toad in his jaws which 
he was preparing to swallow, with the latter dis- 
tended to three times his width ; but he relin- 
quished his prey, and fled. And I thought, as the 
toad jumped leisurelj^ away, with his slime-covered 
hind-quarters glistening in the sun (as if I, his 
deliverer, wished to interrupt his meditations), with- 
out a shriek or fainting, — I thought, ' What a 
healthy indifference is manifested ! ' 'Is not tliis 
the broad earth still?' he said." He thinks the 



272 TEOEEAU, 

yellow, swelling throat of tlie bull-frog comes 

with the water-lilies. It is of this faultless singer 

the good young English lord courteously asked, on 

hearing it warble in the marsh one day, " What 

Birds are those ? " 

" Dear, harmless age ! the short, swift span, 
When weeping virtue parts with man." 

In his view, the squirrel has the key to the 
pitch-pine cone, that conical and spiry nest of 
many apartments; and he is so pleased with the 
flat top of the muskrat's head in swimming, and 
his back even with it, and the ludicrous way he 
shows his curved tail when he dives, that he can- 
not fail to draw them on the page. Many an hour 
he spent in watching the evolutions of the min- 
nows and the turtle laying its eggs, running his 
own patience against that of the shell, and at last 
concludes the stink-pot laid its eggs in the dark, 
having watched it as long as he could see without 
their appearance. ''As soon as these reptile eggs 
are laid, the skunk comes and gobbles up the nest.'* 
Such is a provision of Nature, who keeps that uni- 
versal eating-house where guest, table, and keeper 
are on the bill. 

His near relation to flowers, their importance in 
his landscape and his sensibihty to their colors, 
have been joyfully reiterated. He criticised his 
floral children : " Nature made ferns for pure 



FIELD SPORTS. 273 

leaves to show what she could do in that line. The 
oaks are in the gray, or a little more ; and the de- 
ciduous trees invest the woods like a permanent 
mist. What a glorious crimson fire as you look up 
to the sunlight through the thin edge of the scales 
of the black spruce ! the cones so intensely glow- 
ing in their cool green buds, while the purplish 
sterile blossoms shed pollen upon you. ... It 
seemed hke a fairy fruit as I sat looking towards 
the sun, and saw the red maple-keys, made all 
transparent and glowing by the sun, between me 
and the body of the squirrel." The excessively 
minute thread-like stigmas of the hazel seen against 
the light pleased him with their ruby glow, and 
were almost as brilliant as the jewels of an ice- 
glaze. It is like a crimson star first detected in the 
twilight. These facts and similar ones, observed 
afresh each year, verify his criticism, that he ob- 
serves with the risk of endless iteration^ he milks 
the sky and the earth. He alludes to a ba}^- 
berry bush without fruit, probably a male one, — " it 
made me realize that this was only a more distant 
and elevated sea-beach, and that we were within the 
reach of marine influences," — and he sees " banks 
sugared with the aster Tradescanti. I am detained 
by the very bright red blackberry-leaves strewn 
along the sod, the vine being inconspicuous, — how 
they spot it ! I can see the anthers plainly on the 

12* R 



274 TEOREAU. 

great, rusty, fusty globular buds of the slippery 
elm. The leaves in July are the dark eyelash of 
summer ; in May the houstonias are like a sugaring 
of snow. These little timid wayfaring flowers were 
dried and eaten by the Indians, — a delicate meal, — 

Speechless and calm as infant's sleep. 

" The most interesting domes I behold are not 
those of oriental temples and palaces, but of the 
toadstools. On this knoll in the swamp they are 
little pyramids of Cheops or Cholula, which also 
stand on the plain, very delicately shaded off. 
They have burst their brown tunics as they ex- 
panded, leaving only a clear brown apex, and on 
every side these swelling roofs or domes are patched 
and shingled with the fragments, delicately shaded 
off thus into every tint of brown to the edge, as if 
this creation of a night would thus emulate the 
weather-stains of centuries ; toads' temples, — so 
charming is gradation. I hear the steady (not 
intermittent) shrilling of apparently the alder- 
cricket, — hear it! but see it not, clear and au- 
tumnal, a season round. It reminds me of past 
autumns and the lapse of time, suggests a pleasing, 
thoughtful melancholy, like the sound of the flail. 
Such preparations^ such an outfit has our life^ and 
so little brought to pass. Having found the Oalla 
palustris in one place, I soon found it in another." 



FIELD SPORTS. 275 

He notes the dark-blue domes of the soap-wort 
'gentian. " The beech-trunks impress you as full of 
health and vigor, so that the bark can hardly con- 
tain their spirits, but lies in folds or wrinkles about 
their ankles like a sock, with the embonpoint of 
infancy, — a wrinkle of fat. The fever-bush is 
betrayed by its little spherical buds, in January. 
Yellow is the color of spring ; red, that of mid- 
summer: through pale golden and green we 
arrive at the yellow of the buttercup ; through 
scarlet to the fiery July red, the red lily." He finds 
treasures in the golden basins of the cistus. The 
water-target leaves in raid-June at Walden are 
scored as by some literal characters. Some dewy 
cobwebs arrange themselves before his happy eyes, 
like little napkins of the fairies spread on the grass. 
The scent of the partridge-berry is between that 
of the rum-cherry and the Mayflower, or like 
peach-stone meats. 

" How hard a man must work in order to acquire 
his language, — words by which to express himself. 
I have known a particular rush by sight for the 
past twenty years, but have been prevented from 
describing some of its pecuharities, because I did 
not know its name. With the knowledge of. the 
name comes a distincter knowledge of the thing. 
That shore is now descfibable, and poetic even. 
My knowledge was cramped and confused before, 



276 THOREAU. 

and grew rusty because not used : it becomes com- 
municable, and grows by communication. I can 
now learn what others know about the same thing. 
In earliest spring you may explore, — go looking 
for radical leaves. What a dim and shadowy ex- 
istence have now to our memories the fair flowers 
whose locahties they mark ! How hard to find any 
trace of the stem now after it has been flatted 
under the snow of the winter ! I go feeling with 
wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass 
and the snow for their prostrate stems, that I may 
reconstruct the plant : — 

* Who hath the upright heart, the single eye, 
The clean, pure hand 1 ' 

It as sweet a mystery to me as ever what this 
world is. The hickories putting out young, fresh, 
yellowish leaves, and the oaks light-grapsh ones, 
while the oven-bird thrums his sawyer-like strains, 
and the chewink rustles through the dry leaves, or 
repeats his jingle on a tree-top, and the wood- 
thrush, the genius of the wood, whistles for the 
first time his clear and thrilling strain. It sounds 
as it did the first time I heard it. I see the strong- 
colored pine, the grass of trees, in the midst of 
which other trees are but as weeds or flowers, a lit- 
tle exotic. The variously colored blossoms of the 
shrub-oaks, now in May hanging gracefully like 



FIELD SPORTS. 277 

ear-drops, the frequent causeways and the hedge- 
rows, jutting out into the meadows, and the islands, 
have an appearance fall of life and light. There 
is a sweet, wild world which lies along the strain 
of the wood-thrush, the rich intervales which bor- 
der the stream of its song, more thoroughly genial 
to my nature than any other." 

I heard the Spring tap at the door of Winter ; 

Silently she drew herself within his house ; 

Softly she with sun undraped its lights, 

And made her cottage gay. With buds, with flowers, 

With her frail flowers, she painted the soft floors 

Of the romantic woods, and then the trees 

She broke into their clouds of foliage. 

The humming flies came forth, the turtles' gold 

Shone o'er the red-floored brook, the thrasher sang 

His singular song near by. 

O Thou! the life 
That flames in all the maples, and whose hand 
Touches the chords of the mute fields until 
They sing a colored chorus, thou, my God, 
Let mortals kneel until thou callest them ! 

The neottia and the rattle-snake plantain are 
the little thingswhich make one pause in the wood, 
— take captive the eye. The morning-glory by 
Hubbard's bridge is a goblet full of purest morn- 
ing au', and sparkling with dew, showing the dew- 
point. He scents the perfume of the penny-royal 
which his feet have bruised ; the Clethra alnifolia 
is the sweet-smelling queen of the swamp. The 



278 THOREAU. 

white waxen berries of the white-berried or pani- 
cled cornel are beautiful, both when full of fruit 
and when its cymes are naked, — delicate red 
cymes or stems of berries, spreading their little 
fairy fingers to the skies, their little palms ; fairy 
palms they may be called. " I saw a delicate 
flower had grown up two feet high between the 
horses' path and the wheel-track. An inch more 
to right or left had sealed its fate, or an inch 
higher, and yet it lived to flourish as much as if it 
had a thousand acres of untrodden space around it, 
and never knew the danger it incurred. It did 
not borrow trouble, nor invite an evil fate by 
apprehending it." 

" I think of what times there are, such as when 
they begin to drive cows to pasture, and when the 
boys go after the cows in July. There is that time 
about the first of June, the beginning of summer, 
when the buttercups blossom in the now luxuriant 
grass, and I am first reminded of mowing and the 
daisy ; when the lady's slipper and the wild-pink 
have come out on the hill-sides amid the goodly 
company of the blue lupines : Then has its summer- 
hour fairly struck upon the clock of the seasons. 
In distant groves the partridge is sitting on her 
eggs. When the fresh grass waves rank, and the 
toads dream, and the buttercups toss their heads, 
and the heat disposes to bathe in the ponds and 



FIELD S POUTS. 279 

streams, then is the summer begun. I saw how 
he fed his fish, they swimming in the dark nether 
atmosphere of the river rose easily to swallow 
such swimmers (June-bugs) of the hght upper at- 
mosphere, and sank to its bottom." He notices the 
Datura stramonium (thorn-apple) as he is crossing 
the beach of Hull, and felt as if he was on the 
highway of the world at the sight of this veteran 
and cosmopolite traveller. Nature in July seems 
like a hen with open mouth panting in the grass. 
He hears then, as it were, the mellow sounds of 
distant horns in the hollow mansions of the upper 
air, and he thinks more than the road-full. " While 
I am abroad the ovipositors plant their seeds in 
me ; I am fly-blown with thoughts, and go home to 
hatch and brood over them. It is now the royal 
month of August. When I hear the sound of the 
cricket, I am as dry as the rye which is everywhere 
cut and housed, though I am drunk with the sea- 
son's pain. The swallow goes over with a watery 
twittering. The farmer has driven in his cows, and 
is cutting an armful of green corn-fodder for them. 
The loads of meadow-hay pass, which the oxen 
draw indifferently. The creak of the cricket and 
the sight of the prunella and the autumnal dande- 
lion say : ' Work while it is day, for the night 
cometh in which no man can work.' " 

" Both the common largest and the smallest hy- 



280 THOREAU. 

pericums and the pin-weeds were very ricli browns 
at a little distance (in the middle of March), col- 
oring whole fields, and also withered and falling 
ferns reeking wet. It was a prospect to excite a 
reindeer : these tints of brown were as softly and 
richly fair and sufficing as the most brilliant au- 
tumnal tints. There are now respectable billows 
on our vernal seas ; the water is very high, and 
smooth as ever it is. It is very warm ; I wear but 
one coat. On the water, the town and the land it 
is built on seems to rise but little above the flood. 
I realize how water predominates on the surface of 
the globe ; I am surprised to see new and unex- 
pected water-lines drawn by the level edge of the 
flood about knolls in the meadows and in the 
woods, — waving lines which mark the boundary 
of a possible or probable freshet any spring. In 
September we see the ferns after the frost, like so 
many brown fires they light up the meadows. In 
March, when the browns culminated, the sun being 
concealed, I was drawn toward and worshipped 
the brownish light in the sod and the withered 
grass on barren hills; I felt as if I could eat the 
very crust of the earth, — I never felt so terrene, 
never sympathized so with the surface of the earth. 
At the same date comes the arrow-head crop, hu- 
manity patent to my eyes as soon as the snow goes 
off. Not hidden away in some crypt or grave, or 



FIELD SPORTS. 281 

under a pyramid, no disgusting mummery, but a 
clean stone ; the best symbol that could have been, 
transmitted to me, the Red Man, his mark. They 
are not fossil bones, but, as it were, fossil thoughts. 
When I see these signs, I know that the maker is 
not far off, into whatever form transmuted. This 
arrow - headed character promises to outlast all 
others. Myriads of arrow-points lie sleeping in the 
skin of the revolving earth while meteors revolve 
in space. The footprint, the mind-print of the 
oldest men, for they have camped on the plains of 
Mesopotamia and Marathon too. I heard lately 
the voice of a hound hunting by itself. What an 
awful sound to the denizens of the wood, that re- 
lentless, voracious, demonic cry, like the voice of 
a fiend ! at the hearing of which the fox, hare, and 
marmot tremble for their young and themselves, 
imagining the worst. This, however, is the sound 
which the lords of creation love, and accompany 
with their bugles and mellow horns, conveying a 
singular dread to the hearer, instead of whispering 
peace to the hare's palpitating breast." 

"And their sun does never shine, 

And their fields are bleak and bare, 
And their ways are filled with thorns : 
It is eternal winter there." 

" As the pine-tree bends and waves like a feather 
in the gale, I see it alternately dark and light, as 



282 TEOREAU. 

the sides of the needles which reflect the cool sheen 
are alternately withdrawn from and restored to the 
proper angle. I feel something like the young 
Astyanax at the sight of his father's flashing crest. 
A peculiarity of these days (the last week of May) 
is the first hearing the cricket's creak, suggesting 
philosophy and thought. No greater event trans- 
pires now. It is the most interesting piece of 
news to be communicated, yet it is not in any 
newspaper. I went by Temple's, — for rural inter- 
est give me the houses of the poor. The creak of 
the mole cricket has a very afternoon sound. The 
heron uses these shallows on the river, as I can- 
not, — I give them up to him. I saw a gold-finch 
eating the seeds of the coarse barnyard grass, 
perched on it : it then goes off with a cool twitter. 
No tarts that I ever tasted at any table possessed 
such a refreshing, cheering, encouraging acid that 
literally put the heart in you and an edge for this 
world's experiences, bracing the spirit, as the cran- 
berries I have plucked in the meadows in the 
spring. They cut the winter's phlegm, and now I 
can swallow another year of this world without 
other sauce. These are the warm, west-wind, 
dream-toad, leafing-out, willowy, haze days (May 
9). No instrumental music should be heard in the 
streets more youthful and innocent than willow 
whistles. Children are digging dandelions by the 



FIELD SPORTS. 283 

roadside with a pan and a case knife. This re- 
calls that paradisiacal condition, — 

COUNTRY-LIVING. 

Our reputation is not great, 
Come ! we can omit the date ; 
And the sermon, — truce to it ; 
Of the judge buy not a writ. 
But collect the grains of wit, 
And sound knowledge sure to hit. 
Living in the country then, 
Half remote from towns and men, 
With a modest income, not 
More than amputates the scot ; 
Lacking vestures rich and rare. 
Those we have the worse for wear, 
Economic of the hat, 
And in fulness like the rat. 
Let us just conclude we are, 
Monarchs of a rolling star ! 
Fortune is to live on little. 
Happily the chip to whittle. 
He who can consume his ill. 
Daintily his jDlatters fill. 
What 's the good of hoarding gold ? 
Virtue is not bought and sold. 
He who has his peace of mind 
Fears no tempest, seas, nor wind : 
He may let the world boil on. 
Dumpling that is quickly done, 
And can drain his cup so pleasing, 



284 TEOREAU. 

Not the ear of Saturn teasing ; 
Thus defended in his state, 
Pass its laws without debate, 
And not wasting fi-iends or fortune, 
Yet no distant stars importune. 

He thus describes the last moments of an 
unfortunate minister : " Then this musky lagune 
had put forth in the erection of his ventral fins, 
expanding suddenly under the influence of a more 
than vernal heat, and his tender white belly 
where he kept no sight, and the minister squeaked 
his last ! Oh, what an eye was there, my country- 
men, — buried in mud up to the lids, meditating 
on what ? Sleepless at the bottom of the pool, at 
the top of the bottom, directed heavenward, in no 
danger from motes ! Pouts expect not snapping- 
turtles from below. Suddenly a mud volcano 
swallowed him up, — seized his midriff. He fell 
into those relentless jaws which relax not even in 
death. ... I saw the cat studying ornithology 
between the corn-rows. She is full of sparrows, 
and wants no more breakfast this morning, unless it 
be a saucer of milk, — the dear beast ! No tree has 
so fair a bole and so handsome an instep as the beech. 
The botanists have a phrase, mantissa^ an additional 
matter about something, that is convenient." He 
uses " crichicroches, zigzagging, brattling, tus- 
sucky, trembles, flavid, z-ing ; " and says of a 



FIELD SPORTS, 285 

farmer, that he keeps twenty-eight cows, which are 
milked at four and a half o'clock, a.m. ; but he gives 
his hired men none of the milk with their coffee. 
" Frogs still sound round Callitriche Pool, where 
the tin is cast ; no doubt the Romans and Ninevites 
had such places : to what a perfect system this 
world is reduced ! I see some of those little cells, 
perhaps of a wasp or bee, made of clay : it suggests 
that these insects were the first potters. They 
look somewhat like small stone jugs. Evergreens 
would be a good title for my things, or Gill-go- 
over-the-ground, or Winter Green, or Checkerberry, 
or Usnea lichens. Methinks the scent is a more 
oracular and trustworthy inquisition than the 
eye. When I criticise my own writing, I go 
to the scent, as it were. It reveals, of course, 
what is concealed from the other senses; by it, 
I detect earthiness. How did these beautiful rain- 
bow tints get into the shell of the fresh-water 
clam, buried in the mud at the bottom of our dark 
river ? 

" When my eyes first rested on Walden, the 
striped bream rested on it though I did not see it, 
and when Tahatawan paddled his canoe there. 
How wild it makes the pond and the township to 
find a new fish in it ! America renews her youth 
here. The bream apjrreeiated floats in the pond as 
the centre of the system, a new image of God. 



286 THOREAU. 

Its life no man can explain more than he can his 
own. I want you to perceive the mystery of the 
bream : I have a contemporary in Walden. How 
was it when the youth first discovered fishes ? was 
it the number of the fin-raj^s or their arrangement ? 
No ! but the faint recognition of a living and new 
acquaintance, a friend among the fishes, a provok- 
ing mystery. I see some feathers of a blue jay 
scattered along a wood-path, and at length come 
to the body of the bird. What a neat and deli- 
cately ornamented creature ! finer than any work 
of art in a lady's boudoir, with its soft, light pur- 
plish-blue crest, and its dark blue or purplish 
secondaries (the narrow half) finely barred with 
dusky. It is the more glorious to live in Concord 
because the jay is so splendidly painted. ... In 
vain were the brown spotted eggs laid [of a hen- 
hawk killed] , in vain were ye cradled in the lof- 
tiest pine of the swamp ! Where are your father 
and mother ? will they hear of your early death, 
before ye had acquired your full plumage ? They 
who nursed and defended ye so faithfully ! " " It is 
already fall (August 4) in low swampy woods 
where the cinnamon-fern prevails. So do the 
seasons revolve, and every chink is filled. While 
the waves toss this bright day, the ducks asleep are 
drifting before it across the ponds ; snow-buntings 
are only winged snow-balls (where do they pass the 



FIELD SPORTS. 287 

night?) This (April 3) might be called the Day 
of the Snoring Frogs, or the Awakening of the 
Meadows ; and toad-spawn is like sun-squaicl, re- 
lating our marshes to Provincetown Beach. We 
love to wade through the shallows to the Bedford 
shore ; it is delicious to let our legs drink air. 
The palustris frog has a hard, dry, unmusical, 
fine, watchman's-rattle-like stertoration ; he knows 
no winter. . . . Nature works by contraries : that 
which in summer was most fluid and unresting 
is now, in February, most solid and motionless. 
Such is the cold skill of the artist, he carves 
a statue out of a material which is as fluid as 
w^ater to the ordinary workman, — his sentiments 
are a quarry with which he works. I see great 
bubbles under the ice as I settle it down, three 
or four feet wide, go waddling or wabbling away, 
like a scared lady impeded by her train. So 
Nature condenses her matter: she is a thousand 
thick." 

" Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, 
as when you find a trout in the milk. ' Says I to 
Myself,' — should be the motto to my journal. . . . 
They think they love God ! It is truly his old 
clothes of which they make scarecrows for the 
children. When will they come nearer to God 
than in those very children? Hard are the times 
when the infants' shoes are second-foot, — trun- 



288 , THOREAU, 

cated at the toes. There is one side of Abner's 
house painted as if with the pumpkin pies left over 
after Thanksgiving, it is so singular a yellow : — 

" And foul records 
Which thaw my kind eyes still." 

"I saw the seal of evening on the river. After 
bathing, even at noonday, a man realizes a morn- 
ing or evening life, — a condition for perceiving 
beauty. How ample and generous was Nature ! 
My inheritance is not narrow. The water, indeed, 
reflects heaven because my mind does. The triv- 
ialness of the day is past ; the greater stillness, 
the serenity of the air, its coolness and transpar- 
ency, are favorable to thought (the pensive eve). 
The shadow of evening comes to condense the 
haze of noon, the outlines of objects are firm and 
distinct (chaste eve). The sun's rays fell at 
right angles on the pads and willow-stems, I sit- 
ting on the old brown geologic rocks, their feet 
submerged and covered with weedy moss. There 
w^as a quiet beauty on the landscape at that hour 
which my senses were prepared to appreciate. I 
am made more vigorous by my bath, more con- 
tinent of thought. Every sound is music now in 
view of the sunset and the rising stars, as if there 
were two persons whose pulses beat together." 



CHARACTEBS. 289 



CHAPTER XV. 

CHAEACTERS. 

"Without misfortunes, what calamity! 
And what hostility without a foe? " 

YOUNO. 

*' O thou quick heart, which pantest to possess 
All that anticipation feigneth fair ! 
Thou vainly curious mind, which wouldest guess 
"Whence thou didst come, and whither thou mayst go, 
And that which never yet was known would know." 

SHELI.ET. 

" How seldom, Friend! a good great man inherits 
Honor or wealth, with all his worth and pains? 
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends,— 
Hath he not always treasures, always friends, 
The great good man? three treasures, love and light 
And calm thoughts, regular as infant's breath." 

Coleridge. 

" The very dust of his writings is gold." — Bentley of Bishop Peaesok. 

T3 ECOURSE can once more be had to the note- 
books of Thoreau's conversations, as giving 
his opinions in a familiar sort as well as to afford 
in some measure a shelter from the blasts of fate. 
" Here is news for a poor man, in the raw of a 
September morning, by way of breakfast to him." 

SOCIETY. 

The house looks shut up. 

Oh, yes I the owner is gone ; he is absolutely out. 
13 , s 



290 THOREAU. 

We can then explore the grounds, certain not to 
interrupt the studies of a philosopher famed for 
his hospitality. 

How like you the aspect of the place now we 
have passed the gate ? 

It seems well designed, albeit the fences are 
dropping away, the arbors getting ready for a 
decent fall, and the bolts and pins lacking in the 
machinery of the gardens. I think mostly of the 
owner, whom you, however, know so much better 
than I can. 

I know him as I know old fables and Grecian 
mythologies. Further from all this modern life, 
this juggling activity, this surperfluous and untam- 
able mediocrity, seems he to remove with each sea- 
son. Dear Eidolon dwelleth in the rainbow vistas 
in skies of his own creating. No man in history 
reminds me of him, nor has there been a portrait 
left us of so majestic a creature, who certainly hath 
more a fabled and half-divine aspect than most 
of those so liberally worshipped by the populace. 
Born in the palmy days of old Greece, and under 
the auspices of Plato, he would have founded a 
school of his own, and his fame had then descended 
to posterity by his wise sayings, his lovely man- 
ners, his beautiful person, and the pure austerities 
of a blameless and temperate life. Gladl}^ had the 
more eminent sculptors of the Athenian metropolis 



CHARACTERS, 291 

chiselled in stone his mild and serene countenance, 
his venerable locks, and in the free and majestic 
garb of those ^picturesque eras he would have ap- 
peared as the most graceful and noble of all their 
popular figures. He would have founded their 
best institutions especially chosen by the youth of 
both sexes, and all who loved purity, sanctity, and 
the culture of the moral sentiment had flocked 
about this convenient and natural leader. Nor 
should his posthumous writings have been left ined- 
ited ; for the w^orthiest of his scholars, seizing upon 
these happy proofs of his indefatigable industry, and 
such* evidences of his uninterrupted communica- 
tions with higher natures, would have made it the 
most chosen pleasure of his life to have prepared 
them in an orderly and beautiful design for coming 
ages. I know not but he had been worshipped 
formally in some peculiar temple set apart for 
his particular religion, for there inevitably springs 
out of him a perfect cultus, which a wise and 
imaginative age could have shaped into its prac- 
tical advantage. Born upon a platform of sor- 
did and mechanical aims, he has somewhat 
eclipsed and atrophied, and, if detected critically, 
blurred with scorn or ridicule, so that perchance 
he had been more pleasantly omitted from all 
observation. 

Thou hast drawn, O Musophilus ! the portrait of 



292 THOSE AU. 

a null imaginary paragon. I have not seen tlie 
Phoenix of whom thou hast been discoursing. 

No : there is not much of the worshipping kind 
in thee, though thou shouldst pass well for being 
worshipped. Thou art, I fear, among the scoffers. 
Be certain that the truth is so ; that our ancient 
Eidolon does represent those aspects of the wor- 
thier ages, and yet shall his memory be respected 
for these properties. 

I admire not thy notices and puffs of a better 
age, of a happier time : Don Quixote's oration to the 
goat-herds should have despatched that figment. I 
like better Jarno's opinion, — " our America is here 
or nowhere." Beneath our eyes grow the flowers 
of love, religion, sentiment, and valor. To-day is 
of all days the one to be admired. Alas for the 
sentimental tenderness of Jean Paul, that amusing 
madman with a remnant of brains ! he has flung 
up his Indian ocean with the peacock-circle of its 
illuminated waves before our island, and Thomas 
Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt 
draughts on hope distracts us. Give this class of 
unhappy people a little more room and less gloom. 
What canker has crept into so many kind-hearted 
creatures to deride our respectable times ? I be- 
lieve, too, in the value of Eidolon, but it is as good 
company. There are no milestones, no guide-posts, 
set up in that great listener's waste. His ears are 



CHARACTERS. 293 

open spaces, abysses of air into which you may 
pour all da}' your wisest and best, your moonshine 
and your dreams, and still he stands like one ready 
to hear. All other men seem to me obstructions. 
Their minds are full of their own thoughts, — 
things of Egypt, as Mr. Borrow's gypsy Antonio 
calls them, — but Eidolon has reached this i^lanet 
for no purpose but to hear patiently, smoothly, and 
in toto the doings of your muse ; and if he replies, 
it is in a soft, sweet, and floating fashion, in a sea 
of soap-bubbles that puts your dull phlegmatism 
going, loosens the rusty anchor of your cupidity, 
and away sails your sloop. 

What we so loosely name a community should 
have been the appropriate sphere for this excellent 
genius. Even in these flatulent attempts they 
demand what they call a practical man, a desperate 
experimenter, sure to run the communal bank 
under the water. A few gravelly acres, some dry 
cows and pea-hens to saw up the sunny noons, with 
our good Eidolon at the head, behold a possible 
community. In his pocket lies the practical man's 
notions of communing, — I mean his purse. 

I have fancied Cervantes shadows in his novel 
the history of our socialists. 

Not of the whole : ere long the communit}^ must 
be the idea and the practice of American society. 
Each year more clearly sets forth the difficulties 



294 THOREAU, 

under which we labor to conduct the simplest 
social operations, like mere household service. 
Such a rough grindstone is your Christian Ameri- 
can family to the hard- worked Irish girl, and wild 
is the reaction of the strong-tempered blade on the 
whirling stone, — to make coffee and bake bread. 
Not to do the thing for yourself constitutes the 
person who does it at once the possessor of your 
moneys, goods, and estate ; and, from the lack of 
sympathy and equality in the contract, Bridget 
slides out of your kitchen the victor in this unequal 
contest, when you have made her by your lessons 
valuable to others. And what better is your rela- 
tion with the gentleman you send to Washington 
by means of your votes and good wishes, having 
his eye bent on the main chance. Cities are ma- 
lignant with crime ; paupers are classed and studied 
like shrimps ; the railroad massacres its hundreds 
at a smash ; steamboats go down, and blow up ; 
and these evils are increasing steadily, till the 
social crisis comes. Nothing for all these cases but 
the community, no more selfish agents, no corpo- 
rations fighting each other, no irresponsible actors, 
— all must be bound as one for the good of each, 
labor organized for the whole equally. 

We have sat too long in this .crazy arbor; it 
is contagious. Let us walk amid last year's stalks. 
" Little joy has he who has no garden," says Saadi. 



CBABACTEB8. 295 

" He who sees my garden sees my heart," said the 
prince to Bettine. I prefer the names of pears to 
those of most men and women. Our little gentle- 
man, with his gaseous inflamed soul, can never be 
satisfied with that Httle which he needs and not 
for long. Satisfied ! No, Faintheart, you are as 
unsatisfied as the toper without his glass, the maid 
without her lover, or the student without his book. 
I can allow thee, mortal as I am, but six minutes 
to tell thy story. What needest thou, then, added 
to that thou hast ? Community, indeed ! a mere 
artifice of the do-nothings to profit by the labors of 
industry. There thou art, with thy five feet eight 
in thy shoes, and a certain degree of bodily vigor 
and constitution. I have not heard thee complain 
of the headache or the gout ; thou hast never St. 
Anthony's fire ; thy corns, if thou hast, are limited ; 
and thou canst, on occasion, plod thy dozen of miles 
and not expire. Let us agree that middle-age has 
come, and one half the vital candle has been burnt 
and snuffed away. Some kind of shed, with a 
moderate appurtenance of shingle, belongs to your 
covering, on the outskirts of yonder village ; some 
little table-linen, not damask I grant ; maybe a 
cup of coffee to your breakfast, and some crust of 
haddock, or soured residuum of starch, called bread, 
to thy meal. Of clothing thou hast not cloth of 
gold, — we are plain country people and decline 



296 THOBEAU. 

it. A few friends remain, as many or more than 
tlioii hast deserved. Having all this, some liberty 
and hope of Marston's immortality (that depends 
on personal value), I seriously demand, what more 
could you have ? Can nothing appease the ever 
disorderly cravings of that adamantine contra- 
diction, thy imbecile soul ? Buy him up or flatter 
him into quiet ; or could you not give him away or 
sell him into splendid exile? at least, expunge 
him ! 

Whichever way we choose in the fields, or down 
the locomotive spine that bands with yellow the 
else green meadow, you will observe the hay- 
maker. Now is the high holiday and the festival 
of that gramineous sect ; now are the cattle kneeled 
to by humanity ; and all these long baking days 
there they toil and drudge, collating the winter 
hay -mow of cow and ox, determined by some secret 
fate to labor for an inferior race. 

They are so serious in such matters, one might 
suppose they never speculate on the final cause of 
pitching hay. 

Just as seriously this excellent society contem- 
plates the butcher, the grocer, or the clergyman. 
As if, given time and the human race, at once fol- 
lows absurd consequence. Spring to your pitch, 
jolly haymakers ! you fancy you are putting time 
to good advantage in chopping away so many inno- 



CHARACTERS. 297 

cent spires of grass, drying them, and laying tbem 
industriously in the mow. In spite of that official 
serenity which nothing can disturb, if you would 
forego the cow and horse from your contemplations 
you might leave the grass unmown for ever and a 
day. Organize an idea among the brethren of 
spending their hours after a certain fashion, and 
then woe be to the lunatics who discern its imper- 
fections. In history, haymaking may figure as an 
amazing bit of the antique, and pitchforks be ex- 
hibited in museums for curiosities. 

I understand your jest : it is your old notion to 
abbreviate human work. You would fain intro 
duce the study of botany or metaphysics for these 
vigorous games of our sunburnt swains, and con- 
vert them into sedentary pedants, to be fed on 
huckleberries and mast. In the sweat of thy face 
shalt thou earn thy bread. Labor comes out of 
human existence, like the butterfly out of the 
caterpillar. How tremendously that vigorous Hi- 
bernian pokes aloft his vast pitchfork of blue timo- 
thy ! May I never be seated on the prong ! And 
his brogue is as thick as his hay-mow. No law ever 
made such a police as labor. Early to bed and 
early to rise grows by farming. Tire him, says 
Destiny ; wear him out, arms, legs, and back ; 
secure his mischievous wild energy ; get him under, 
the dangerous cartridge he is of exploding un- 

13* 



298 THOREAU. 

licensed sense ; and whether it be good for cow or 
horse, whatever the means, the end is delightful. 
Nature must have made the human race, like most 
of her things, when she had the chance, and without 
consideration of the next step. She drove along 
the business, and so invented mankind as rapidly as 
possible ; and observing the redskin, cousin to 
the alligator, — living on the mud of rivers, the 
sap of trees, with a bit of flat stone for his hatchet, 
and a bit of pointed stone for his cannon, — red- 
skin, a wild fellow, savage and to the manner born, 
— leaving the woods and fields, the flowers, in- 
sects, and minerals untouched, she was thus far 
content. This imperfect redskin was surely some 
improvement upon the woodchuck and the mus- 
quash. But after coming to the age of bronze, the 
Danish Kitchen-moddings, and the Swiss lake- 
dwellings, some million centuries, and a certain 
development, the aboriginal began to develop a 
new series of faculties that Nature in eliminating 
him never thought nor dreamed of; for we must 
carefully confess Nature misses imagination. Our 
redskin had fenced himself from bears and deer 
with their own skins, lit a perennial fire, (was it 
not hard, yet to be expected in the Greeks, that 
they had never a temple of Prometheus ?) dug 
out some stones and melted them, burnt the trunks 
of trees into boats, at length built houses, and all 



CHARACTERS. 299 

the while with his arts, fine or coarse, grew up his 
passions. Our whiteskin — for now the color of 
him, by shelter and clothing, had turned white 
— became a cultivated savage, and still luxuriat- 
ing in his old cannibal propensities hacked and 
hewed, fought and killed his kind, much to the 
surprise of his sleepy mother ; and not after the 
honest primeval fashions that she liked well enough, 
being of her own invention, but after every excru- 
ciating device of artist-demonism. Now what could 
she do for him, how keep him in place, circumvent 
his trucidating mania, and make him somewhat 
helpless ? It was the work of a moment (Nature's 
moments being somewhat extended), an accident. 
She not only taught whiteskin how to work, but he 
came to be just a mere laboring machine ; the sav- 
age had his msouciance, the civilizee has his com- 
petitive industry, — " dearest, choose between the 
two ? " This new toy is the true Dana'ides sieve, 
the rock of Tantalus, which is christened industry, 
economy, or money, like the boy's toad in the well, 
whose position his master set him to make out as a 
task, — the toad jumping one step up and falling 
two steps back, how long would it require for 
him to get to the top ? The boy ciphered a long 
time and filled his slate, went through recess, and 
noon and afternoon : at last his instructor asked 
him, after keeping him at it all day, as to his pro- 



800 TEOBEAU. 

gress and how far lie liad got the toad. " What? " 
said the boy, — " that toad, that nasty little toad ? 

Why, to be sure, he 's half way down into 

by this time." That is where the great mother, 
blessings on her comfort, has located our brother- 
man, with his pitchfork, plough-tail, and savings- 
bank. It is the consequence of a quandary, this 
boasted civilization^ as Fourier terms it, when Nat- 
ure, having hurried her poor plucked creature into 
existence (even if Darwin thinks he rubbed off his 
wool climbing bread-fruit trees and flinging down 
cocoa-nuts to his offspring), was compelled for safety 
to set up this golden calf, this lovely mermaid-civ- 
ilization, with a woman's head and a fish's tail, 
clipper-ships, and daily papers. Expediency is 
Nature's mucilage, her styptic. Never shall we 
see the terminus of this hastily built railroad, no 
station. . But there must be a race that will, when 
the mind shall be considered before the belly, and 
when raising food for cows, other things being pos- 
sible, may not be to every human being just an in- 
scrutable penalty. Cows may get postponed after 
a time for mere men and women ; but even milking 
a beast is a better course of policy than cutting 
holes in your brother's skull with a bushwhack. 
Our mythology hath in it a great counterpoise of 
ethics and compensation, while the Greeks hung 
aloft their theoretical people, where at least they 



CHARACTERS. 301 

could do no harm if they did not any benefit, while 
some of our goodies to-day seem to be, like the 
spider, spinning an immortal coil of ear-wax. 

I strive to be courtesy itself, yet I may not 
accept thy fact nor thy conclusion. That redskin 
was nearer nature, was truer than this pale-face ; 
his religion of the winds, the waters and the skies, 
was clearer and fresher than your dry and desiccated 
theologies, dug out of Egyptian tombs and Numid- 
ian sandbanks. He properly worshipped the devil, 
the evil spirit, wisely agreeing that if the good spirit 
was of that ilk he was harmless, like the Latins, 
whom I look upon as the best type of Indians that 
ever lived. As Tiberius says, who made his Latin 
rhyme (no doubt they had as much rhyme as they 
wanted), " deorum injurice^ dis curm^^ — " the gods 
may cut their own corns for all me." Or what old 
Ennius thinks : — 

" Ego deura genus dixi et dicam coelitum, 
Sed eos non curare, opinor, quid agat humanuin genus ; 
Nam, si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc abest." 

In other words, " I know all about your race of 
gods, but little they trouble their heads about your 
folks ; if they cared a snap, they would see the good 
well off and the bad punished, which is just the 
opposite to the fact." Is not that good Indian? 
Or what Lucan says in his Pharsalia (vii. 447) : — 



802 THOREAU. 

" Mentimur regnare Jovem . . . mortalia nulli 
Sunt curata Deo." 

" Every fool knows it 's a lie that Jove reigns, — 
the >gods don't busy their brains about such no- 
bodies as men." I try to give you the ideas of 
these solemn Latin savages, who had neither hats 
to their heads, shirts to their bodies, nor shoes to 
their feet. Why might not some learned professor 
derive us from the Romans? I believe a return 
to the savage state would be a good thing, interpo- 
lating what is really worthy in our arts and sci- 
ences and thousand appliances, — 

" That the wind blows, 
Is all that anybody knows." 

I believe in having things as they are not ? Ay, 
down to the dust with them, slaves as they are I 
Down with your towns, governments, tricks and 
trades, that seem like the boy who was building 
the model of a church in dirt as the minister was 
passing ! " Why, my little lad," said he, " why, 
making a meeting-house of that stuff? Why, 
why ! " " Yes," answered the youth, " yes, I am ; 
and I expect to have enough left over to make a 
Methodist minister besides." There is always 
some new fatality attending your civility. Here is 
our town, six miles square, with so many dogs and 
cats, so many men and women upon it, a town 
library and a bar-room, taxes, prisons, churches, rail- 



CHARACTERS. 303 

roads, — and always more and more to come. And I 
must be taxed as well as the others ; as if I am ripe 
for chains or the gibbet, because the drunkard, poi- 
soned with his own rum while selling it for the 
good of his neighbors, dies of cerebral congestion 
or a pistol. Society has no definitions, and of 
course no distinctions ; accepts no honesties, be- 
lieves too much in going to the b&,d. 

You are over-critical. The true art of life con- 
sists in accepting things as they are, and not 
endeavoring vainly to better them. It is but a 
drawing of lots. I am melted when I see how 
finely things come out, and pin-pricks decide grave 
affairs. A certain man (I will not name him here, 
as personalities must be avoided) determined to 
keep house on a better plan: no flies, no bills, — 
even the cry of offspring at night cancelled. This 
was enough evil for that day: the next all the 
doors were open, flies abounded, children cried in 
swarms, cash for bills was needed. Our friend 
began again with it all, put his reforms in practice, 
and serenity came from his efforts for the time 
being ; bul; there is another relapse as soon as his 
hand leaves the crank of the household. So he 
consults Mrs. Trip, — she has experience as a house- 
keeper, — details his wretchedness : life is at such a 
pass, expense vast, little to be had for it and noth- 
iug to defray it ; a ream of German fly-paper has 



304 TEOBEAU. 

produced double the number of flies that it kills ; 
as for his babies, there seems to have been a com- 
bination among them to blow their lungs out with 
squalls. Mrs. Trip heard the social horrors, and 
said, *' Mr. Twichett, excuse me, there is a little 
matter." '' Yes, mum, I know it," says our gen- 
tleman, supposing it the latest infant or the bill for 
salt-fish. " l£* appears, Mr. Twichett, that you 
keep your eyes open. Yes, sir! you keep your 
eyes open." 

CHRYSOSTOM. 

I lately paid a visit upon an ingenious gentle- 
man, and found him mopping up a topic which had 
a singular importance in his eyes, and that was 
New England. " Indeed," I thought, " a fine 
subject for the dead of winter ! " You must 
know, sir, that friend Chrysostom presents the 
aspect of man talking, as dear Eidolon thinking. 
And, as the honey-lipped philosopher is about to 
embark on a voyage to the provinces, he is resolved 
to enlighten them there on this his favorite prob- 
lem. '' Indeed," I thought to myself, " this man, 
like Curtius, is also a hero in his way : he is a man 
of parts ; and, next to beating carpets on the Com- 
mon, I must say he chooses delightful subjects." 
I fell upon him with my modern flail, to see what 
grain I could find amid his glittering straws. 



CHARACTERS. 305 

And how did you prosper? Was there much 
-sediment in the husk? 

Chrysostom is too learned a master of his weapon 
to abandon all his treasure to the unreserved gaze 
of each incredulous worldling. He has, however, 
attained proximately to something that might be 
termed a criticism of New England. Good, bad, 
or indifferent, 'tis not a pure vacuity that one finds 
in this pitiful corner of a continent, with Cape 
Cod for a seacoast and Wachusett for a mountain. 
Chrysostom has picked his men as specimens of the 
mass; his persons on which he so much insists, 
the merchant, the scholar, the reformer, the proser, 
and what not, — along the dusty high-roads of 
life, but you may not greatly expand the list, — 
lead flats. A few serenities stand sentinel on the 
watch-towers of thought, not as stars to the mass, but 
as burnt-out tar-barrels. Materialism carves tur- 
keys and cuts tunnels. Be bright, my dear talker, 
shine and go along ; as Dante, says, " Hurry on your 
words." I deemed not so much of his topics as of 
the man himself, greater far than all his topics, the 
ultimate product of all the philosophies, with an 
Academe of Types. He has caught the universe 
on his thumbnail, and cracked it ; he has been at 
the banquet of the gods, and borrowed the spoons. 
Most other men have some superstitious drawback 
to them, some want of confidence in their uni- 



306 THOREAU. 

-versal wholes. But our great friend, with his mus- 
cular habit of thought, grasps hold of infinity and . 
breaks it across his arm, as Gustavus Adolphus, 
that hero of Captain Dalgetty's, a horse-shoe. 
" Never," said he, " can you get a good brain until 
all the people of the earth are poured into one, and 
when the swarthy Asiatic thinks in the same skull 
with the ghostly Swede. And soon I see that this 
railroad speed of the age shall transmigrate into 
the brain. Then shall we make the swiftness of 
the locomotive into the swiftness of the thought ; 
and the great abolition society shall come, not of 
slavery alone, — in dress and diet, in social relations 
and religion. It may not prevail for a pair of her- 
mits to go out together and make a community ; 
for so shall they be the more solitary. You think 
the men are too near that I should draw their por- 
traits truly, but you know not that I am living as 
one dead, and that my age is like one walking far 
off in a dream to me. That golden steed, the Pe- 
gasus, on which I am mounted, has shot with me 
far beyond the thoughts and the men of to-day." 
As he said this, I looked up at the window, cer- 
tainly expecting to see some sort of strange appa- 
rition in the air, some descent of a sign from heaven 
upon this glorious expanding beyond time ; but all 
I could see was a fat serving-maid, in a back case- 
ment, arranging some furniture with a vacillating 



CHARACTERS. 307 

rag. Types of the ideal and the real, I thought to 
myself, "*' Man should never for an instant blame 
the animals," he continued, "for showing their 
apparent inferiorities : they do simply formalize our 
sins ; and Agorax should beware of pork, as he 
is feasting upon his ancestry. The tail of the 
dog is the type of the affections." No matter 
how dry the topic, it seems as if Chrysostom 
had plunged down into the cellar of the gods, 
and moistened his intellectual clay at every 
golden cider-bung. " Nature is a fine setting for 
man ; and when I speak of the New English, how 
can I forget the departure from their old abbeys, 
green fields, and populated wheat-lands for this sour 
fish-skin ? Three degrees of elevation towards the 
pole overturn all jurisprudence, and virtue faints 
in the city of the pilgrims. The handsome youth 
fires the tragic pistol, the handsome girl seeks her 
swift revenge on prose in her opium. And in these 
architectures cold, still, and locked, in these flat, 
red-brick surfaces, and the plate-glass windows 
that try to flatten your nose when you think to 
look in, — do you not behold something typical? 
This prismatic nucleus of trade, deducting its tolls 
from the country through its roads, drawing Ver- 
mont and New Hampshire and floating them away 
o'er yon glittering blue sea between those icy 
islands ! Some smaller German orchestra leads off 



308 TEOREAU. 

the musical ear, and the shops are cracking with 
French pictures that would not be sold in Paris. 
The merchant has his villa, his park, and his ca- 
leche : it is the recoil of the passions ; it is fate, 
and no star of heaven is visible. The oak in the 
flower-pot might serve as a symbol ; or, as Jugur- 
tha said, when he was thrust into his prison, 
' Heavens, how cold is this bath of yours ! ' If 
the All-Father had said to our metaphysical North- 
man, to this Brain-berserkir : Come and sit thee 
beneath the fluttering palms, and listen to the flow 
of lordly rivers ; thee will I feed on orient pearls of 
dew, thy bed shall be of sun-flowers, thy dress 
of the gossamer twilight ! " 

Light from the spirit-land, 

Fire from a burning brand, 

If in this cold sepulchral clime, 

Chained to an unmelodious rhyme, 

Thou slowly moulderest, — 
Yet cheer that great and humble heart, 
Prophetic eye and sovereign part, 
And be thy future greatly blest. 
And by some richer gods impressed, 

And a sublimer art. 

Strike on ! nor still the golden lyre, 
That sparkles with Olympian fire, 
And be thy words the soul's desire 
Of this dark savage land ; 



CHABACTEBS. 309 

Nor shall thy sea of glory fail 
Whereon thou sweepest, — spread thy sail, 
And blow and fill the heaviest gale, 
It shall not swerve thy hand. 

Born for a fate whose secrets none 
Shall gaze upon beneath earth's sun. 
Child of the high, the only One, 

Thy glories sleep secure ; 
Yet on the coast of heaven thy wave 
Shall dash beyond an unknown grave, 
And cast its spray to light and save 

Some other barks that moor ! 



310 TEOBEAU. 



CHAPTER XYI. 

MOEAL. 



" Exactissima norma Romansa frugalitatis." 

Said of Mannius Curius. 

" Laborers that have no land 
To lyve on but hire handes." 

Piers Plo-wman. 

"Les gros bataillons ont toujours raison." 

JOMINI. 

" The day that dawns in fire will die in storms, 
Even though the noon be calm." 

Shelley. 

** When thou dost shine, darkness looks white and fair, 
Frowns turn to music, clouds to smiles and air." 

Vaughan. 

" Dum in Proelio non procnl hinc 
Inclinatam suorum aciem 
Mente manu voce et exemplo 
Kestituebat 

Pugnans ut heroas decet 
Occubuit." 

Marshal Keith's Epitaph. 



TTTHAT a life is the soldier's, — like other 
^ ^ men's ! what a master is the world ! Heaven 
help those who have no destiny to fulfil, balked of 
every chance or change, of all save the certainty of 
death ! Thoreau had a manifest reason for living. 
He used to say, "I do not know how to entertain 



MORAL. 311 

those who can't take long walks. A night and a 
forenoon is as much confinement to those wards 
(the house) as I can stand." And although the 
rich and domestic could "beat him in frames," 
like that Edinburgh artist whom Turner thus com- 
plimented, he was their match in the open. Men 
affected him more naturally. " How earthy old 
people become, — mouldy as the grave. Their 
wisdom smacks of the earth : there is no foretaste 
of immortality in it. They remind one of earth- 
worms and mole-crickets." Seeing the negro barber 
sailing alone up the river on a very cold Sunday, 
he thinks he must have experienced religion ; a 
man bathing from a boat in Fairhaven Pond sug- 
gests; "Who knows but he is a poet in his yet 
obscure and golden youth? " And he loved to go 
unmolested. He would not be followed by a dog 
nor cane. He said the last was too much com- 
pany. When asked whether he knew a young 
miss, celebrated for her beauty, he inquired, " Is 
she the one with the goggles ? " He thought he 
never noticed any one in the street ; yet his con- 
temporaries may have known as much of him while 
living as of Shakespeare when dead. His mental 
appearance at times almost betrayed irritability ; 
his words were like quills on the fretful porcupine 
(a libel on the creature, which is patience ah ovo}. 
One of his friends complained of him ; " He is so 



812 THOREAV. 

pugnacious I can love, but I can never like him." 
And he had a strong aversion to the Scribes and 
Pharisees. Those cracked potsherds, traditionary 
institutions, served him as butts, against whose 
sides he discharged the arrows of his wit, echoing 
against their massive hollowness. Yet, truly, the 
worship of beauty, of the fine things in nature, of 
all good and friendly pursuits, was his staple ; he 
enjoyed common people ; he relished strong, acrid 
characters. 

When with temperaments radically opposed to 
his, he drew in the head of his pugnacity like 
that portion of one of his beloved turtles, and 
could hiss and snap with any ancient of them all. 
The measured, conservative class, dried-up Puritan 
families, who fancy the Almighty Giver of all good 
things has fitted their exquisite brain precisely to 
his evangelic nightcap ; prosers with their uni- 
verse of meanness and conceit to change square 
with you against gold and diamonds ; folks of 
easy manners, polished and oiled to run sharpl}^ on 
the track of lies and compliments, — of such he was 
no great admirer. Neither did he go with Goe- 
the, that other people are wig-blocks on which we 
must fit our own false heads of hair to fetch them 
out. Like a cat he would curl up his spine and 
spit at a fop or monkey, and despised those who 
were running well down hill to damnation. His 



MORAL. 313 

advice to a drunkard as the wisest plan for him to 
reform, " You had better cut your throat," — that 
was his idea of moral suasion, and corresponded 
with his pleasure at John Brown's remark of a bor- 
der ruffian he had despatched, rapidly paring a\vay 
his words, — " He had a perfect right to be hung." 
To this his question points, — "If it were not for 
virtuous, brave, generous natures, would there be 
any sweet fragrance ? Genius rises above nature in 
spite ofiieat, in spite of cold, works and lives." 
Persons with whom he had no sj^mpathy were to 
him more removed than stocks apd stones : " Look- 
ing at the latter, I feel comparatively as if I were 
with my kindred. Men may talk about measures 
till all is blue and smells of brimstone, and then go 
home and expect their measures to do their duty 
for them : the only measure is integrity and man- 
hood. We seem to have used up all oar inherited 
freedom like the young bird the albumen in the 
shell. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and pov- 
erty ! I cannot overstate this advantage, I am per- 
haps more wilful than others. Common life is hasty, 
coarse, and trivial, as if you were a spindle in a fac- 
tory. No exercise implies more manhood and vigor 
than joining thought to thought. How few men can 
tell what they have thought ! I hardly know half a 
dozen who are not too lazy for this. You conquer 
fate by thought. If you thhik the fatal thought of 
14 



314 TEOBEAU. 

men and institutions, you need never pull the trig- 
ger. The consequences of thinking inevitably fol- 
low. There is no more Herculean task than to think 
a thought about this life, and then get it expressed. 
There are those who never do or say any thing, 
whose life merely excites expectation. Their excel- 
lence reaches no further than a gesture or mode of 
carrying themselves ; they are a sash dangling from 
the waist, or a sculptured war-club over the shoulder. 
They are like fine-edged tools gradually becoming 
rusty in a shop- window. I like as well, if not bet- 
ter, to see a piece of iron or steel out of which such 
tools will be made, or the bushwhack in a man's 
hand. . . . The watchmaker finds the oil from 
the porpoise's jaw the best thing for oiling his 
watches. Man has a million eyes, and the race 
knows infinitely more than the individual. Con- 
sent to be wise through your race. We are never 
prepared to believe that our ancestors lifted large 
stones or built thick walls. . . . There is always 
some accident in the best things, whether thoughts, 
or expressions, or deeds. The memorable thought, 
the happy expression, the admirable deed are only 
partly ours. The thought came to us because we 
were in a fit mood, also we were unconscious and 
did not know that we had said or done a good 
thing. We must walk consciously only part way 
toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our 



MORAL. 315 

success. What we do best or most perfectly is 
what we most thoroughly learned by the longest 
practice, and at length it fell from us without our 
notice as a leaf from a tree. It is the last time we 
shall do it, — our unconscious leavings : — 

'Man is a sammer's day, whose youth and fire 
Cool to a glorious evening and expire/ 

*' It is remarkable how little we attend to what 
is constantly passing before us, unless our genius 
directs our attention that way. In the course of 
ages the rivers wriggle in their beds until it feels 
comfortable under them. Time is cheap and rather 
insignificant. It matters not whether it is a river 
which changes from side to side in a geological 
period, or an eel that wriggles past in an instant. 
A man's body must be rasped down exactly to a 
shaving. The mass of men are very unpoetic, yet 
that Adam that names things is always a poet. 
No man is rich enough to keep a poet in his pay, yet 
what a significant comment on our life is the least 
strain of music. This poor, timid, unenlightened, 
thick-skinned creature, what can it believe ? When 
I hear music, I fear no danger ; I am invulnerable ; 
I see no foe ; I am related to the earliest times, 
and to the latest. I hear music below ; it washes 
the dust off my life and every thing I look at. The 
field of my life becomes a boundless plain, glorious 
to tread, with no death or disappointment at the 



316 THOBEAU. 

end of it* In the light of this strain there is no 
Thou nor I. How inspiring and elysian it is to 
hear when the traveller or the laborer, from a call 
to his horse or the murmur of ordinary conversa- 
tion, rises into song ! It paints the landscape sud- 
denly ; it is at once another land, — the abode of 
poetry. Why do we make so little ado about 
echoes ? they are almost the only kind of kindred 
voices that we hear : — 

* Scattering the myrrhe and incense of thy prayer.' " 

A coxcomb was railed at for his conceit : he said, 
" It is so common every one has it ; why notice it 
specially in him ? " He gets up a water-color sketch 
of an acquaintance. "He is the moodiest person 
perhaps I ever saw. As naturally whimsical as a 
cow is brindled, both in his tenderness and in his 
roughness he belies himself. He can be incredibly 
selfish and unexpectedly generous. He is con- 
ceited, and yet there is in him far more than usual 
to ground conceit upon. He will not stoop to rise. 
He wants something for which he will not pay the 
going price. He will only learn slowly by failure, 
not a noble but a disgraceful failure, and writes 
poetry in a sublime slip-shod style.'' But despite 
his caveats^ his acceptance was large, he took nearly 
every bill. The no-money men, butter-egg folks ; 
women who are talking-machines and work the 



MORAL. 317 

threads of scandal ; paupers, walkers, drunk or dry, 
poor-house poets, no matter, the saying of Tacitus 
abided, — "I am a man, and nothing human but 
what can go down with me." Of such a one he 
says, '• His face expressed no more curiositj^ or rela- 
tionship to me than a custard pudding." Of such 
is the kingdom of poor relations. 

No man had a better unfinished life. His antici- 
pations were vastly rich : more reading was to be 
done over Shakespeare and the Bible ; more choice 
apple-trees to be set in uncounted springs, — for his 
chief principle was faith in all things, thoughts, and 
times, and he expected, as he said, " to live for forty 
years." He loved hard manual work, and did 
not mean to move every year, like certain literary 
brethren. In his business of surveying he was 
measurably diligent, and having entered on a plan 
would grind his vest away over the desk to have 
done with it. He laid out every molecule of fidel- 
ity upon his employer's interests, and in setting a 
pine-lot for one says, " I set every tree ivith my 
own hands.''^ Yet like moralists, though he tried 
to pay every debt as if God wrote the bill, he takes 
himself to task : " I remember with a pang the past 
spring and summer thus far. I have not been an 
early riser: society seems to have invaded and 
overrun me." 

Thus intensely he endeavored to live, but living 



318 TEOREAV. 

is not all. He had now more tlian attained the 
middle age, his health sound to all apj)earance, his 
plans growing more complete, more cherished ; new 
lists of birds and flowers projected, new details to 
be gathered upon trees and plants, now embarking 
more closelj in the details of this human enterprise 
which had been something miscellaneous ; the time 
had fauiy come to take an account of stock, and to 
know how we really stood on terra firma. Here 
was a great beginning in a condition of matchless 
incompleteness to be adjusted by no one but the 
owner. In !&foYember, 1860, he took a severe cold 
by exposing himself while counting the rings on 
trees and when there was snow on the ground. This 
brought on a bronchial affection, which he much 
increased by lecturing at Waterbury ; and although 
he used prudence after this, and indeed went a-jour- 
neying with his friend, Horace Mann, Jr., into 
Minnesota, this trouble with the bronchise con- 
tinaed. With an unfaltering trust in God's mer- 
cies and never deserted by his good genius, he most 
bravely and unsparingly passed down the inclined 
plane of a terrible malady, pulmonary consump- 
tion, working steadily at the completing of his pa- 
pers to his last hours, or so long as he could hold 
the pencil in his trembhng fingers. Yet, if he did 
get a little sleep to comfort him in this year's cam- 
paign of sleepless affliction, he was sure to interest 



MORAL. 819 

those about him with his singular dreams, more 
than usually fantastic : he said once that, having 
got a few moments of repose, " sleep seemed to 
hang round my bed in festoons." The last sen- 
tence he incompletely spoke contained but two dis- 
tinct words, "moose," and "Indians," showing 
how fixed in his mind was that relation. Then the 
world he had so long sung and delighted in faded 
tranquilly away from his eyes and hearing, till on 
that beautiful spring morning of May 6th, 1862, it 
closed on him. 

" In this roadstead I have ridden, 
In this covert I have hidden, 
Friendly thoughts were cliffs to me, 
And I was beneath their lea. 

This true people took the stranger. 
And warm-hearted housed the ranger; 
They received their roving guest. 
And have fed him with the best ; 

Whatsoe'er the land afforded 
To the stranger's wish accorded, 
Shook the olive, stripped the vine. 
And expressed the strengthening wine. 

And by night they did spread o'er him 
What by day they spread before him, 
That good-will which was repast 
Was his covering at last." 



820 THOBEAU. 

His state of mind during this, his only decided 
illness, deserves notice as in part an idiosyncrasy. 
He accepted it heroically, but in no wise after the 
traditional manner. He experienced that form of 
living death when the very body refuses sleep, such 
is its deplorable dependence on the lungs now 
slowly consumed by atoms ; in its utmost terrors 
refusing aid from any opiate in causing slumber, 
and declaring uniformly that he preferred to endure 
with a clear mind the worst penalties of suffering, 
rather than be plunged in a turbid dream by nar- 
cotics. He ineffably retired into his inner mind, 
into that unknown, unconscious, profound world 
of existence where he excelled ; there he held in- 
scrutable converse with just men made perfect, or 
what else, absorbed in himself. " The night of 
time far surpasses the day ; and who knows when 
was the equinox ? Every hour adds unto the cur- 
rent arithmetic, which scarce stands one moment. 
And since death must be the Lucina of life ; since 
our longest sun sets on right declensions, and makes 
but winter arches, therefore it cannot be long before 
we lie down in darkness and have our light in 
ashes. Sense endureth no extremities, and sor- 
rows destroy us or themselves : our delivered senses 
not relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sor- 
rows are not kept raw by the edge of repetitions." 
An ineffable reserve shrouded this to him unfore- 



MORAL. 321 

seen fatality : he had never reason to believe in 
what he could not appreciate, nor accepted formu- 
las of mere opinions ; the special vitalization of all 
his beliefs, self-consciously, Ijdng in the marrow of 
his theology. 

As noticed, he had that forecast of life which by 
no means fulfils its prediction deliberately ; else 
why are these mortal roads on which we so pre- 
dictively travel strewn with the ashes of the young 
and fair, — this Appian Way devised in its tombs, 
from the confidence of the forty years to come? 
'^Quisque suos patimur manes, — we have all our 
infirmities first or last, more or less. There will 
be, peradventure, in an age, or one of a thousand, 
a Pollio Romulus, that can preserve himself with 
wine and oil ; a man as healthy as Otto Hervar- 
dus, a senator of Augsburg in Germany, whom 
Leovitius, the astrologer, brings in for an example 
and instance of certainty in his art ; who, because 
he had the significators in his geniture fortunate, - 
and free from the hostile aspects of Saturn and 
Mars, — being a very cold man, — could not re- 
member that ever he was sick." The wasting away 
of his body, the going forth and exit of his lungs, 
which, like a steady lamp, give heat to the frame, 
was to Henry an inexplicably foreign event, the 
labors of another party in which he had no hand ; 
though he still credited the fact to a lofty in- 
14* u 



322 THOREAU. 

spiration. He would often say that we could look on 
ourselves as a third person, and that he could per- 
ceive at times that he was out of his mind. Words 
could no longer express these inexplicable condi- 
tions of his existence, this sickness which reminded 
him of nothing that went before : such as that 
dream he had of being a railroad cut, where they 
were digging through and laying down the rails, 
— the place being in his lungs. His habit of en- 
grossing his thoughts in a journal, which had lasted 
for a quarter of a century ; his out-of-door life, of 
which he used to say, if he omitted that, all his 
living ceased, — all this now became so incontro- 
vertibly a thing of the past that he said once, stand- 
ing at the window, " I cannot see on the outside at 
all. We thought ourselves great philosophers in 
those wet days, when he used to go out and sit 
down by the wall-sides." This was absolutely all 
he was ever heard to say of that outward world 
during his illness ; neither could a stranger in the 
least infer that he had ever a friend in field or 
wood. Meanwhile, what was the consciousness in 
him, — what came to the surface ? Nothing save 
duty, duty, work, work ! As Goethe said at the 
loss of his son, "It is now alone the idea of duty 
that must sustain us," Thoreau now concentrated 
all his force, caught the shreds of his fleeting phys- 
ical strength the moment when the destinies ac- 



MORAL, 323 

corded to liim a long breath, to complete his stories 
of the Maine Woods, then in press ; endeavor 
vainly to finish his lists of Birds and Flowers, and 
arrange his papers on Night and Moonlight. Never 
at any time at all communicative as to his own 
physical condition, having caught that Indian trick 
of superlative reticence, he calmly bore the fatal 
torture, this dying at the stake, and was torn limb 
from limb in silence : — 

" When all this frame 
Is but one dramme, and what thou now descriest 
In sev'rall parts shall want a name." 

His patience was unfailing : assuredly he knew 
not aught save resignation ; he did mightily cheer 
and console those whose strength was less. His 
every instant now, his least thought and work, 
sacredly belonged to them, dearer than his rapidly 
perishing life, whom he should so quickly leave 
behind. As long he could possibly sit up, he in- 
sisted on his chair at the family-table, and said, 
" It would not be social to take my meals alone." 
And on hearing an organ in the streets, playing 
some old tune of his childhood he should never 
hear again, the tears fell from his eyes, and he said, 
" Give him some money I give him some money I " 

" He was retired as noontide dew, 
Or fountain in a noon-day grove ; 



824 TEOBEAU. 

And you must love him, ere to you 
He would seem worthy of your love. 

The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ; 
And impulses of deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude." 

His mortal ashes are laid in the Concord bury- 
ing-ground. A lady on seeing this tranquil spot, 
and the humble stone under the pitch-pine tree, re- 
plied to one who wished for him a starry-pointing 
monument, " This village is his monument, covered 
with suitable inscriptions by himself." 

Truth, audacity, force, were among Thoreau's 
mental characteristics, devoted to humble uses. 
His thoughts burned like flame, so earnest was his 
conviction. He was transported infinitely beyond 
the regions of self when pursuing his objects, single- 
hearted, doing one thing at a time and doing that 
in the best way ! Self-reliance shall serve for his 
motto, — 

" His cold eye truth and conduct scanned." 

His faith in wildness was intrinsic. Whatever 
sport it was of nature, this child of an old civiliza- 
tion, this Norman boy with the blue eyes and brown 
hair, held the Indian's creed, and believed that 
plant and animal were a religion unto themselves 
and unto him. He spoke with that deeper than 



MORAL. 325 

self-conscious conviction which must animate na- 
ture. It required, literally, an unquestioning 
obedience to that sphere and rule of life he kept ; 
his means to his ends, — Thoreau, the Poet- 
Naturalist. 



MEMORIAL VERSES, 



ILLUSTRATING CHIEFLY 



SCENES OF THOREAU'S LIFE. 



To Henry. 
White Pond. 
A Lament. 
MoRRiCE Lake. 
Tears in Spring. 



The Mill Brook. 
Stillriver, the Winteb 

Walk. 
Truro. 



MEMORIAL VERSES, 329 



I. 

To Heney. 

He ARE ST thou the sobbing breeze complain 
How faint the sunbeams light the shore ?- 

His heart more fixed than earth or main, 
Henry ! thy faithful heart is o'er. 

Oh, weep not thou thus vast a soul, 
Oh, do not mourn this lordly man, 

As long as Walden's waters roll, 
And Concord river fills a span. 

For thoughtful minds in Henry's page 
Large welcome find, and bless his verse, 

Drawn from the poet's heritage, 

From wells of right and nature's source. 

Fountains of hope and faith ! inspire 
Most stricken hearts to lift this cross. 

His perfect trust shall keep the fire, 
His glorious peace disarm the loss ! 



330 TEOBEAU. 



II. 

White Pond. 

Gem of the wood and playmate of the sky, 
How glad on thee we rest a weary eye, 
When the late ploughman from the field goes home, 
And leaves us free thy solitudes to roam ! 

Thy sand the naiad gracefully had pressed. 
Thy proud majestic grove the nymph caressed. 
Who with cold Dian roamed thy virgin shade, 
And, clothed in chastity, the chase delayed. 
To the close ambush hastening at high noon. 
When the hot locust spins his Zendic rune. 

Here might Apollo touch the soothing lyre. 

As through the darkening pines the day's low fire 

Sadly burns out, and Venus nigh delay 

With young Adonis, while the moon's still ray 

Mellows the fading foliage, as the sky 

Throws her blue veil of twilight mystery. 

No Greece to-day, no dryad haunts the road 
Where sun-burned farmers their poor cattle goad ; 
The black crow caws above yon steadfast pine, 
And soft Mitchella's odorous blooms entwine 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 331 

jam, 
man's 



These mossy rocks, and piteous catbirds scream. 
And redskins flicker through the white man's 
dream. 



Who haunts thy wood-path? 

pressed 
Save by the rabbit's foot, its winding best 
Kept a sure secret, till the tracks, in snow 
Dressed for their sleds, the lumbering woodmen 

plough. 
How soft yon sunbeam paints the hoary trunk, 
How fine the glimmering leaves to shadow sunk ! 
Then streams across our grassy road the line 
Drawn firmly on the sward by the straight pine; 
And curving swells in fi'ont our feet allure. 
While far behind the curving swells endure ; 
Silent, if half pervaded by the hum 
Of the contented cricket. Nature's sum 
Is infinite devotion. Days nor time 
She emulates, — nurse of a perfect prime. 
Herself the spell, free to all hearts ; the spring 
Of multiplied contentment, if the ring 
With which we're darkly bound. 

The pleasant road 
Winds as if Beauty here familiar trode, 
Her touch the devious curve persuasive laid. 
Her tranquil forethought each, bright primrose 

stayed 
In its right nook. And where the glorious sky 
Shines in, and bathes the verdant canopy. 
The prospect smiles delighted, while the day 
Contemns the village street and white highway. 



332 THOBEAU. 

Creature all beauteous ! In thy ftiture state 
Let beauteous Thought a just contrivance date ; 
Her altars glance along thy lonely shore, 
Relumed ; and on thy leafy forest floor 
Tributes be strewn to some divinity 
Of cheerful mien and rural sanctity. 
Pilgrims might dancing troop their souls to heal ; 
Cordials, that now the shady coves conceal, 
Reft from thy crystal shelves, we should behold, 
And by their uses be thy charms controlled. 

Naught save the sallow herdsboy tempts t^e shore, 
His charge neglecting, while his feet explore 
Thy shallow margins, when the August flame 
Burns on thy edge and makes existence tame; 
Naught save the blue king-fisher rattling past, 
Or leaping fry that breaks his lengthened fast ; 
Naught save the falling hues when Autumn's sigh 
Beguiles the maple to a sad reply ; 
Or some peculiar air a sapless leaf 
Guides o'er thy ocean by its compass brief. 

Save one, whom often here glad Nature found 
Seated beneath yon thorn, or on the ground 
Poring content, when frosty Autumn bore 
Of wilding fruit to earth that bitter store ; 
And when the building winter spanned in ice 
Thy trembling limbs, soft lake ! then each device 
Traced in white figui-es on thy seamed expanse 
This child of problems caught in gleeful trance. 
Oh, welcome he to thrush and various jay, 
And echoing veery, period of the day ! 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 333 

To each clear hyla trilling the new spring, 
And late gray goose buoyed on his icy wing ; 
Bold walnut-buds admire the gentle hand, 
While the shy sassafras their rings expand 
On his approach, and thy green forest wave, 
White Pond ! to him fraternal greetings gave. 
The far white clouds that fringe the topmost pine 
For his delight their fleecy folds decline ; 
The sunset worlds melted their ores for him. 
And lightning touched his thought to seraphim. 
Clear wave, thou wert not vainly made, I know. 
Since this sweet man of Nature thee could owe 
A genial hour, and hope that flies afar. 
And revelations from thy guiding star. 
Oh, may that muse, of purer ray, recount. 
White Pond ! thy glory, and, while anthems mount 
In strains of splendor, rich as sky and air. 
Thy praise, my Henry, might those verses share. 
For He who made the lake made it for thee, 
So good and great, so humble yet so free ; 
And waves and woods we cannot fairly prove, 
Like souls descended from celestial Jove, 
Men that defraud the pathos of the race 
By cheerful aims, and raise their dwelling-place 
On safe Olympus ; hopes that swell untold, 
Too far for language, honesty ne'er sold. 

With thee he is associate. Hence I love 

Thy gleams, White Pond ! thy dark, familiar grove ; 

Thy deep green shadows, clefts of pasture ground; 

Mayhnp a distant bleat the single sound. 

One distant cloud, the sailor of the sky. 

One voice, to which my inmost thoughts reply. 



334 TEOBEAU, 



III. 

A Lament. 

A WAIL for the dead and the dying ! 

They fall in the wind through the Gilead tree, 

Off the sunset's gold, off hill and sea ; 

They fall on the grave where thou art lying, 
Like a voice of woe, like a woman sighing. 

Moaning her buried, her broken love. 

Never more joys, — never on earth, never in heaven 
above I 

Ah, me ! was it for this I came here ? 
Christ ! didst thou die that for this I might live ? 

An anguish, a grief like the heart o'er the bier — 
Grief that I cannot bury, nor against it can strive — 
Life-long to haunt me, while breath brings to-morrow. 
Falling in spring and in winter, rain and sleet sorrow, 
Prest from my fate that its future ne'er telleth. 
Spring from the unknown that ever more welleth. 

Fair, O my fields ! soft, too, your hours ! 
Mother of earth, thou art pleasant to see ! 

I walk o'er thy sands, and I bend o'er thy flowers. 
There is nothing, O nothing, thou givest me, 
Nothing, O nothing, I take from thee. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 335 

What are thy heavens, so blue and so fleeting ? 
(Storms, if I reck not), no echo meeting 
In this cold heart, that is dead to its beating, 
Caring for nothing, parting or greeting ! 



336 



THOBEAU. 



IV. 

MoREicE Lake. 

On Morrice Lake I saw the heron flit 
And the wild wood-duck from her summer perch 
Scale painted bj, trim in her j^lumes, all joy; 
And the old mottled frog repeat his bass, 
Song of our mother earth, the child so dear. 
There, in the stillness of the forest's night, 
Naught but the interrupted sigh of the breeze, 
Or the far panther's cry, that, o'er the lake, 
Touched with its sudden irony and woke 
The sleeping shore ; and then I hear its crash, 
Its deep alarm-gun on the speechless night, — 
A falling tree, hymn of the centuries. 

No sadness haunts the happy lover's mind, 
On thy lone shores, thou anthem of the woods, 
Singing her calm reflections ; the tall pines. 
The sleeping hill-side and the distant sky. 
And thou ! the sweetest figure in the scene, 
Truest and best, the darling of my heart. 

O Thou, the ruler of these forest shades, 
And by thy inspiration who controll'st 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 337 

The wild tornado in its narrow path, 

And deck'st with fairy wavelets the small breeze, 

That like some lover's sigh entreats the lake ; 

O Thoii, Tv'ho in the shelter of these groves 

Build'st up the life of nature, as a truth 

Taught to dim shepherds on their star-lit plains, 

Outwatching midnight ; who in these deep shades 

Seeur'st the bear and catamount a place. 

Safe from the glare of the infernal gun. 

And leav'st the finny race their jDebbled home. 

Domed with thy watery sunshine, as a mosque ; 

God of the solitudes ! kind to each thing 

That creeps or flies, or launches forth its webs, — 

Lord ! in thy mercies, Father ! in thy heart. 

Cherish thy wanderer in these sacred groves ; 

Thy spirit send as erst o'er Jordan's stream, 

Spirit and love and mercy for his needs. 

Console him with thy seasons as they pass, 

And with an unspent joy attune his soul 

To endless rapture. Be to him, — thyself 

Beyond all sensual things that please the eye, 

Locked in his inmost being; let no dread. 

Nor storm with its wild splendors, nor the tomb, 

Nor all that human hearts can sear or scar. 

Or cold forgetfulness that withers hope. 

Or base undoing of all human love. 

Or those fjaint sneers that pride and riches cast 

On unrewarded merit, — be, to him, 

Save as the echo from uncounted depths 

Of an unfathomable past, burying 

All present griefs. 



15 



S38 TEOREAU. 

Be merciful, be kind ! 
Has he not striven, true and pure of heart, 
Trusting in thee ? Oh, falter not, ray child ! 
Great store of recompense thy future holds, 
Thy love's sweet councils and those faithful hearts 
Never to be estranged, that know thy worth. 



MEMORIAL VERSES, 339 



V. 

Tears in Spring. 

The swallow is flying over, 

But he will not come to me ; 

He flits, my daring rover. 

From land to land, from sea to sea ; 

Where hot Bermuda's reef 

Its barrier lifts to fortify the shore, 

Above the surf's wild roar 

He darts as swiftly o'er, — 

But he who heard his cry of spring 

Hears that no more, heeds not his wing. 

How bright the skies that dally 

Along day's cheerful arch. 

And paint the sunset valley ! 

How redly buds the larch ! 

Blackbirds are singing. 

Clear hylas ringing. 

Over the meadow the frogs proclaim 

The coming of Spring to boy and dame, 

But not to me, — ■ 

;Nor thee! 

And golden crowfoot 's shining near, 
Spring everywhere that shoots 'tis clear, 



840 THOREAU. 

A wail in the wind is all I hear ; 
A voice of woe for a lover's loss, 
A motto for a travelling cross, — 
And yet it is mean to mourn for thee, 
In the form of bird or blossom or bee. 

Cold are the sods of the valley to-day 
Where thou art sleeping. 
That took thee back to thy native clay ; 
Cold, — if above thee the grass is peeping 
And the patient sunlight creeping. 
While the bluebird sits on the locust-bough 
Whose shadow is painted across thy brow, 
And carols his welcome so sad and sweet 
To the Spring that comes and kisses his feet. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 341 



VI. 

The Mill Brook. 

The cobwebs close are pencils of meal, 

Painting the beams unsound, 
And the bubbles varnish the glittering wheel 

As it rumbles round and round. 
Then the Brook began to talk 

And the water found a tongue, 
We have danced a long dance, said the gossip, 

A long way have we danced and sung. 

Rocked in a cradle of sanded stone 

Our waters wavered ages alone, 

Then glittered at the spring 

On whose banks the feather-ferns cling, 

And down jagged ravines 

We fled tortured, 

And our wild eddies nurtured 

Their black hemlock screens ; 

And o'er the soft meadows we rippled along, 

And soothed their lone hours with a sweet pensive 

song,— 
Now at this mill we're plagued to stop. 
To let our miller grind the crop. 

So the clumsy farmers come 

With their jolting wagons far from home. 



342 THOREAU. 

We grind tlieir grist, — 

It wearied a season to raise, 

Weeks of sunlight and weeks of mist, 

Days for the drudge and Holydays. 

To me fatal it seems, 

Thus to kill a splendid summer. 

And cover a landscape of dreams 

In the acre of work and not murmur. 

I could lead them where berries grew, 

And sweet flag-root and gentian blue, 

And they will not come and laugh with me, 

Where my water sings in its joyful glee ; 

Yet small the profit, and short lived for them, 

Blown from Fate's whistle like flecks of steam. 

The old mill counts a few short years, — 

Ever my rushing water steers ! 

It glazed the starving Indian's red. 

On despair or pumpkin fed, 

And oceans of turtle notched ere he came, 

Species consumptive to Latin and fame, 

(Molluscous dear or orphan fry. 

Sweet to Nature, I know not why). 

Thoughtful critics say that I 
From yon mill-dam draw supply. — 
I cap the scornful Alpine heads, 
Amazons and seas have beds. 
But I am their trust and lord. 
Me ye quafl* by bank and board, 
Me ye pledge the iron-horse, 
I float Lowells in my source. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 343 

The farmers lug their bags and say, — 

" Neiglibor, wilt thou grind the grist to-day ? " . 

Grind it with his nervous thumbs, 

Clap his aching shells behind it. 

Crush it into crumbs ? 

No ! his dashboards from the wood 
Hum the dark pine's solitude ; 
Fractious teeth are of the quarry 
That I crumble in a hurry, — 
Far-fetched duty is to me 
To turn this old wheel carved of a tree. 

I like the maples in my side, 

Dead leaves, the darting trout ; 

Laconic rocks (they sometime put me out) 

And moon or stars that ramble with my tide, 

The polished air, I think I could abide. 

This selfish race to prove me. 
Who use, but do not love me ! 
Their undigested meal 
Pays not my labor on the wheel. 
I like better the sparrow 
Who sips up a drop at morn. 
Than the men who vex my marrow, 
To grind their cobs and corn. 

Then said I to my brook, " Thy manners mend, 
Thou art a tax on earth for me to spend." 



314 TEOBEAU, 



YII. 

Stillkiver, the Winter Walk. 

The busy city or the heated car, 

The unthinking crowd, the depot's deafening jar, 

These me befit not, but the snow-clad hill 

From whose white steeps the rushing torrents fill 

Their pebbly beds, and as I look content 

At the red Farm-house to the summit lent, 

There, — underneath the hospitable elm, 

That broad ancestral tree, that is the helm 

To sheltered hearts, — not idly ask in vain, 

Why was I born, — the heritage of pain ? 

The gliding trains desert the slippery road. 

The weary drovers wade to their abode ; 

I hear the factory bell, the cheerful peal 

That drags cheap toil from many a hurried meal. 

How dazzling on the hill-side shines the crust, 

A sheen of glory unprofaned by dust ! 

And where thy wave, Stillriver, glides along, 

A stream of Helicon unknown in song, 

The pensive rocks are wreathed in snow-drifts high 

That glance through thy soft tones like witchery. 

To Fancy we are sometimes company, 
And solitude 's the friendliest face we see. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 345 

Some serious village slowly tlirougli to pace, 

No form of all its life thine own to trace ; 

Where the cross mastiff growls with bloocl-shot eye, 

And barks and growls and waits com-ageously ; 

Its peaceful mansions my desire allure 

Not each to enter and its fate endure, — 

But fancy fills the window wdth its guest; 

The laughing maid, — her swain who breaks the jest ; 

The solemn spinster staring at the fire. 

Slow fumbling for his pipe, her solemn sire ; 

The loud-voiced parson, fat with holy cheer, 

The butcher ruddy as the atmosphere ; 

The shopboy loitering with his parcels dull, 

The rosy school-girls of enchantment full. 

Away from these the solitary farm 
Has for the mind a strange domestic charm, 
On some keen winter morning when the snow 
Heaps roof and casement, lane and meadow through. 
Yet in those walls how many a heart is beating. 
What spells of joy, of sorrow, there are meeting! 
One dreads the post, as much the next, delay, 
Lest precious tidings perish on their way. 
The graceful Julia sorrows to refuse 
Her teacher's mandate, while the boy let loose 
Drags out his sled to coast the tumbling hill, 
Whence from the topmost height to the low rill, 
Shot like an arrow from the Indian's bow. 
Downward he bursts, life, limb, and all below 
The maddening joy his dangerous impulse gives; 
In age, how slow the crazy fact revives ! 



16* 



346 THOREAU. 

Afar I track the railroad's gradual bend, 
I feel the distance, feel the silence lend 
A far romantic charm, the Farm-house still 
And spurn the road that plods the weary hill, — 
When like an avalanche the thundering car 
Whirls past, while bank and rail deplore the jar. 
The wildly piercing whistle through my ear 
Tells me I fright the anxious engineer ; 
I turn, — - the distant train and hurrying bell 
Of the far crossing and its dangers tell. 
And yet upon the hill-side sleeps the farm. 
Nor maid or man or boy to break the charm. 

Delightful Girl ! youth in that farm-house old, 
The tender darling in the tender fold, — 
Thy promised hopes fulfilled as Nature sought 
With days and years the income of thy thought ; 
Sweet and ne'er cloying, beautiful yet free. 
Of truth the best, of utter constancy ; 
Thy cheek whose blush the mountain wind laid on, 
Thy mouth whose lips were rosebuds in the sun ; 
Thy bending neck, the graces of thy form. 
Where art could heighten, but ne'er spoil the charm; 
Pride of the village school for thy pure word, 
Thy pearls alone those glistening sounds afibrd ; 
Sure in devotion, guileless and content, 
The old farm-house is thy right element. 
Constance ! such maids as thou delight the eye, 
In all the Nashua's vales that round me lie ! 

And thus thy brother was the man no less, — 
Bred of the fields and with the wind's impress. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 347 

With hand as oi)cn as his heart was free, 

Of strength half-fabled mixed with dignity. 

Kind as a boy, he petted dog and hen, 

Coaxed his slow steers, nor scared the crested wren. 

And not far olf the spicy farming sage. 

Twisted with heat and cold, and cramped with age, 

Who grunts at all the sunUght through the year 

And springs from bed each morning with a cheer. 

Of all his neighbors he can sometidng tell, — 

'Tis bad, whate'er, we know, and like it well ! — 

The bluebird's song he hears the first in spring. 

Shoots the last goose bound South on freezing wing. 

Ploughed and unploughed the fields look all the same, 

White as the youth's first love or ancient's fame ; 

Alone the chopper's axe awakes the hills, 

And echoing snaps the ice-encumbered rills, 

Deep in the snow he wields the shining tool, 

Nor dreads the icy blast, himself as cool. 

Seek not the parlor, nor the den of state 

For heroes brave, make up thy estimate 

From these tough bumpkins clad in country mail, 

Free as their air and full without detail. 

No gothic arch our shingle Psestum boasts, — 
Its pine cathedral is the style of posts, — 
No crumbling abbey draws the tourist here 
To trace through ivied windows pictures rare, 
Not the first village squire allows his name 
From aught illustrious or debauched by fame. 

That sponge profane who drains away the bar 
Of yon poor inn extracts the mob's huzza; 



348 TEOBEAU. 

Conscious of morals lofty as their own, 

The glorious Democrat, — his life a loan. 

And mark the preacher nodding o'er the creed, 

With wooden text, his heart too soft to bleed. 

The ^sculapius of the little State, » 

A typhus sage, sugars his pills in fate, 

Buries three patients to adorn his gig. 

Buys foundered dobbins or consumptive pig ; 

His wealthy pets he kindly thins away, 

Gets in their wills, — and ends them in a day. 

Nor shall the strong schoolmaster be forgot. 

With fatal eye who boils the grammar pot: 

Blessed with large arms he deals contusions round, 

While even himself his awful hits confound. 

Pregnant the hour when at the tailor's store, 
Some dusty Bob a mail bangs through the door. 
Sleek with good living, virtuous as the Jews, 
The village squires look wise, desire the news. 
The paper come, one reads the falsehood there, 
A trial lawyer, lank-jawed as despair. 
Plere, too, the small oblivious deacon sits. 
Once gross with proverbs, now devoid of wits, 
And still by courtesy he feebly moans, 
Threadbare injunctions in more threadbare tones. 
Sly yet demure, the eager babes crowd in, 
Pretty as angels, ripe in pretty sin. 
And the postmaster, suction-hose from birth, 
The hardest and the tightest screw on earth, 
His price as pungent as his hyson green. 
His measure heavy on the scale of lean. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 349 

A truce to these reflections, as I see 
The winter's orb burn through yon leafless tree, 
Where far beneath the track Stillriver runs. 
And the vast hill-side makes a thousand suns. 
This crystal air, this soothing orange sky, 
Possess our lives with their rich sorcery. 
We thankful muse on that superior Power 
That with his splendor loads the sunset hour. 
And by the glimmering streams and solemn woods 
In glory walks and charms our solitudes. 



350 THOBEAU. 



VIII. 

T K U E O. 



Ten steps it lies from off the sea, 

Whose angry breakers score the sand, 
A valley of the sleeping land, 

Where chirps the cricket quietly. 

The aster's bloom, the copses green, 
Grow darker in the softened snn, 
And silent here day's course is run, 

A sheltered spot that smiles serene. 

It reaches far from shore to shore. 
Nor house in sight, nor ship or wave, 
A silent valley sweet and grave, 

A refuge from the sea's wild roar. 

Nor gaze from yonder gravelly height, — 
Beneath, the crashing billows beat. 
The rolling surge of tempests meet 

The breakers in their awful might. 

And inland birds soft warble here, 
Where golden-rods and yarrow shine. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 351 

And cattle pasture — sparest kine ! 
A rural place for homestead dear. 

Go not then, traveller, nigh the shore, 

In this soft valley muse content, 

Nor brave the cruel element, 
That thunders at the valley's door. 

And bless the little human dell, 

The sheltered copse wood snug and warm,— ■ 

Ketreat from yon funereal form, 
Nor tempt the booming surges' knell. 



The Old Wrecker. 

He muses slow along the shore, 
A stooping fonn, his wrinkled face 
Bronzed dark with storm, no softer grace 

Of hope ; old, even to the core. 

He heeds not ocean's wild lament. 

No breaking seas that sight appall, — 
The storms he likes, and as they fall 

His gaze grows eager, seaward bent. 

He grasps at all, e'en scraps of twine, 
None is too small, and if some ship 
Her bones beneath the breakers dip, 

He loiters on his sandy line. 



352 THOSE AU. 

Lonely as ocean is his mien, 

He sorrows not, nor questions fate, 
Unsought, is never desohite, 

Nor feels his lot, nor shifts the scene. 

Weary he drags the sinking beach, 
Undaunted by the cruel strife, 
Alive, yet not the thing of life, 

A shipwrecked ghost that haunts the reach. 

He breathes the spoil of wreck and sea, 
No longer to himself belongs. 
Always within his ear thy songs, 

Unresting Ocean ! bound yet free. 

In hut and garden all the same. 

Cheerless and slow, beneath content, 
The miser of an element 

Without a heart, — that none can claim. 

Born for thy friend, O sullen wave, 

Clasping the earth where none may stand ! 
He clutches with a trembling hand 

The headstones from the sailor's grave. 



III. 



Unceasing roll the deep green waves. 
And crash their cannon down the sand, 
The tyrants of the patient land. 

Where mariners hope not for graves. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 353 

The purple kelp waves to and fro, 

The white gulls, curving, scream along ; 
They fear not thy funereal song, 

Nor the long surf that combs to snow. 

The hurrying foam deserts the sand, 
Afar the low clouds sadly hang, 
But the high sea with sullen clang, 

Still rages for the silent land. 

No human hope or love hast thou, 

Unfeeling Ocean, in thy might. 

Away — I fly the awful sight, 
The working of that moody brow. 

The placid sun of autumn shines, — 
The hurrying knell marks no decline, 
The rush of waves, the war of brine, 

Force all, and grandeur, in thy lines. 

Could the lone sand-bird once enjoy 
Some mossy dell, some rippling brooks, 
The fruitful scent of orchard nooks. 

The loved retreat of maid or boy. 

No, no ; the curling billows green, 
The cruel surf, the drifting sand, 
No flowers or grassy meadow-land. 

No kiss of seasons linked between. 

The mighty roar, the burdened soul, 
The war of waters more and more. 
The waves, with crested foam-wreaths hoar, 

Rolling to-day, and on to roll. 



354 THOREAU. 

TV. 

Windmill on the Coast. 

With wreck of ships, and drifting plank, 
Uncouth and cumbrous, wert thou built, 
Spoil of the sea's unfathomed guilt, 

Whose dark revenges thou hast drank. 

And loads thy sail the lonely wind, 
That wafts the sailor o'er the deep, 
Compels thy rushing arms to sweep, 

And earth's dull harvesting to grind. 

Here strides the fisher lass and brings 
Her heavy sack, while creatures small. 
Loaded with bags and pail, recall 

The youthful joy that works in things. 

The winds grind out the bread of life. 
The ceaseless breeze torments the stone, 
The mill yet hears the ocean's moan. 

Her beams the refuse of that strife. 



I hear the distant tolling bell. 
The echo of the breathless sea; 
Bound in a human sympathy 

Those sullen strokes no tidings tell. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 355 

The spotted sea-bird skims along, 
And fisher-boats dash proudly by ; 
I hear alone that savage cry, 

That endless and unfeeling song. 

Within thee beats no answering heart, 

Cold and deceitful to my race, 

The skies alone adorn with grace 
Thy freezing waves, or touch with art. 

And man must fade, but thou shalt roll 
Deserted, vast, and yet more grand ; 
While thy cold surges beat the strand, 

Thy funeral bells ne'er cease to toll. 



Michel Angelo — an Incident. 

Hard by the shore the cottage stands, 
A desert spot, a fisher's house. 
Where could a hermit keep carouse 

On turnip-sprouts from barren sands. 

No church or statue greets the view, 
Not Pisa's tower or Rome's high wall, 
And connoisseurs may vainly call 

For Bergliem's goat, or Breughel's hue. 

Yet meets the eye along a shed. 
Blazing with golden splendors rare, 
A name to many souls like prayer, 

Robbed from a hero of the dead. 



356 THOREAU. 

It glittered far, the splendid name, 
Thy letters, Michel Angelo, — 
In this lone spot none e'er can know 

The thrills of joy that o'er me came. 

Some bark that slid along the main 

Dropped off her headboard, and the sea 
Plunging it landwards, in the lee 

Of these high cliffs it took the lane. 

But ne'er that famous Florentine 
Had dreamed of such a fate as this, 
Where tolling seas his name may kiss, 

And curls the lonely sand-strewn brine. 

These fearless waves, this mighty sea, 
Old Michel, bravely bear thy name ! 
Like thee, no rules can render tame, 

Fatal and grand and sure like thee. 



YII. 



Of what thou dost, I think, not art, 
Thy sparkling air and matchless force, 
Untouched in thy own wild resource, 

The tide of a superior heart. 

Iso human love beats warm below. 

Great monarch of the weltering waste, • 
The fisher-boats make sail and haste. 

Thou art their savior and their foe. 



MEMORIAL VERSES. 357 

Alone the breeze thy rival proves, 

Smoothing o'er thee his graceful hand, 
Lord of that empire over land. 

He moves thy hatred and thy loves. 

Yet thy unwearied plunging swell, 

Still breaking, charms the sandy reach, 
No dweller on the shifting beach, 

Ko auditor of thy deep knell ; — 

The sunny wave, a soft caress ; 

The gleaming ebb, the parting day; 

The waves like tender buds in May, 
A fit retreat for blessedness. 

And breathed a sigh like children's prayers, 
Across thy light aerial blue. 
That might have softened wretches too, 

Until they dallied with these airs. 

Was there no flitting to thy mood ? 

Was all this bliss and love to last ? 

No lighthouse by thy stormy past, 
No graveyard in thy solitude ! 



Cambridge : Press of JohD Wilson and Son. 



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